You are poetry - an infernal, cascading harmony, dousing Life in wreaths

Of sorrow

You are not that chafing, maddening sadness itching in my very bones and teeth - you are

Relief

You are poetry

Wallowing, murmuring in each and every whit,

On every branch, in every ditch - you are not

The sad and derelict field of lonely thoughts,

Rosy hopes abounding against the droughts

You are that sad solitude itself to me

The diffusion of everything with everything -

Though you are everything, and everything is poetry.

You are poetry

As you sigh and unfold along moribund years,

And howl with stormy, hopeful tears - you are not

Some epochal essence which Time disowned,

Some farewell drink some separation downed

You dug at Life and buried yourself in me

A trace of hope abounding in a drought -

Though you are a rose, and a rose is poetry.

You are poetry

The chaste transcendence where coming myths lie,

Where the sea is wedded to the sky - you are not

The bleeding Sun above despair uprist

The aching thirst, the salt on my parched lips

You drown in words spoken by all but me,

Transcending each word's bitter separation

For you are despair, and despair is poetry.

You are poetry - an infernal, cascading harmony dousing Life in wreaths

Of sorrow

You are not that chafing, maddening sadness itching in my very bonesand teeth -you are

Me

(separate poetry)

A gentle breeze against my face, a glimmer of sunshine amid those drab and solemn old English days which seem to topple onto each other as some kind of joke at our collective expense; a quiet little street leading nowhere in particular, a person smiling without connotations. All these things are but sweet consolations flowing like warm summer days around my unshakeable sense of utter failure - a failure which seeps into everything and anything, to the point were it degrades and dismantles even itself.

The moment I begin to study and imagine the world, I fail. Finding a placebo in pure observation, I am more intimately acquainted with this restless society than any (post-)bohemian. I smile at the interconnectedness of everything. I smile at how the poor, lovestruck artisan (dressed well in order to distinguish himself from other artisans) feels an almighty weight fall in his heart as his beloved turns away in order to engage in a scintillating conversation about chalk, frost, sawdust - anything but him. I smile because she thinks of noone and nothing but him, and in so doing she surrenders all that she is and never was to a cultural inheritance which makes her behave with such vulgarity as to hurt the poor chap. I smile because she does not smile - at least not to him - because she saw an advert about choice and felt free, or saw a film about freedom and felt oppressed. She composes a symphony of life and imposes it on him.

This is failure. In recognising the sheer harmony of everything, I exclude myself from it. I Romanticise it in order to make it bearable, so any thought or idea of mine perishes in my heart the moment I begin to voice it. I suffer in silence, like a cold day.

Yet even to suffer is a monumental failure! I am so self-aware that I have become aware of myself as a copy of so many self-aware failures of the past - and, indeed, the present. Wallowing, as I do, in aesthetics, I repulsed by translating my thoughts into irony, or politics, or psychology, or anything which may be described as an 'issue'. I am nothing if not an infinite regress.

Nothing hurts like love because nothing is so illusory...

It is frequently said that human beings are 'social' animals. Certainly, I see that this is the case: I write these very words using implements I could never have created alone and I write them in an inevitable reaction to the writing of others. It is consciousness - consciousness of our possessious, our limitations, our morality, which binds us.

And yet, consciousness leads me back into myself. Such is the act of life, the spectacle of exteriority so many others present to each other - each individual performing so many variations that it is often hard to keep up - that I sometimes feel I cannot even pretend to trust the consistency of another. I shyly spurn society precisely because I cannot act. I cannot act because I am so genuinely multiple, so antagonistic to any consistent singularity, that I am able to project nothing into the world. My breathing, panting, sighing body is the mundane flesh of what I shall never be; while others appear to have learned which act to perform and upon which stage, I am so relentlessly conscious of the emptiness of the whole thing that I simply cannot act - like a child who, having been told not to lie, runs around aimlessly telling the truth.

Consciousness is a desolate plain where, perhaps, there was once Life.

I live for the night because it is the night which justifies me. By day, each laboured smile of acquiescience, each exchange of empty phrases, each and every last second of monotony drenched in the rabid dramas of others, tears at any semblance of imagination I may have. I am not allowed to feel this way. The modernists did away with any hope for the suffering, thinking people of the world by writing them into novels. The Hunger-Artist is a cliche, probably played by some Gerard Butler-type in the film version. Yet what people appear - still - not to understand is that those of us not blessed with an affinity with the world strong enough for poetry do not suffer for art. We suffer for consciousness. We suffer for the very fact that our suffering is not art but, instead, a state of being. By day, we stubbornly cling to the fantastical fragments of the imagination we have carved for ourselves from out of the dead wood of the world. Yet, even this state of being is little more than our inheritance from the critics of the arts. By day, their observations on the introverted, self-obsessed, self-(de)constructing art of yesteryear peck at the very soul of those of us for whom the sadness of the highest poetry is an artless way of life.

And yet, night-time! So free of the world, wrapping herself around me like a desperate lover hanging (herself) on my every word or whim. So often, I write myself into tears, fetishising that peculiar brand of suffering unrecognised by those intelligent enough not to think: tedium. So often, I hurt myself with words I shall never speak, shimmering as they do in the light of overt consciousness and meekly rolling against each other in some vain hope of becoming something more than their creator. By night, it matters little that I transpose the weightiest of feelings into kitsch, nor that I stare into the abyss and react by drawing a two-dimensional well of despair with hand-me-down words. I think to myself and only for myself. I snuggle the absence of pressure. I continue this way for hours, waiting for sleep to come, knowing that should it not come, I shall be alive for longer.

I have long thought that we build continuity into the world because we, ourselves, lack it entirely.

The wildest passions exist to be extinguished. They cannot exist permanently, for in so doing they would outlive us. We would be integrated into them, just as we are integrated into abstract things - things we have created ourselves - such as society. We long for that sense of permanence because we fear loss, yet it is precisely the sense of loss which drives us! A novel ravishes our intellect because, before it existed, we were ripe for it. It cannot do so again, for in the act of reading we plant seeds which will blossom when we read another; and I believe the same follows for all emotion. We love only so that we may love again, but with greater fervour! We kiss so that we may reach that blissful moment when we stop, when the lips part and we realise that the kiss, which is everything, will never be enough!

Mercilessly lonely, I write these worthless parodies of beautiful literature in the tranquil early hours in the full knowledge that, in the shattering light of day, I shall no longer be the same person. Indeed, the very act of writing soothes the tumultuous collisions of my contradictory thoughts, it eases the sea-sickness of my soul and holds me upright, so that I may rest. Tomorrow, my face will crack in more or less the same fashion when I automatically acknowledge my neighbour as I do each morning; my voice will still waver when I buy the newspaper at my local shop and I consider asking the chap who has served me there for seven years how he is, before burying the question in my larynx. It has been seven years and each day that I did not ask re-inforced the unacceptability of even considering it. In short, my exterior being, the 'self' which our noisey and brutally insecure society takes as for a person's whole, will change little. Yet the raging passion of thought, that indescribable phantasma which took me by the hand and lead me out of Life and into being - my private state of utter sadness - will be written out like a bad soap character. Writing is my constant, the state of permanence others see in relationships, or novels.

I am gagged and bound by self-knowledge. I cannot conduct a conversation without realising that it is simply another way for me to be alone. I impose the most wonderful of literary touches on people because I can; it is not that I believe others revolve around me and my private thoughts. I just feel separate. My wallowing is harmless; after all, unlike the fantasists of literature, I expect nothing from Life. I am more than content with the vulgar and alluring apparition of it all.

I write, and I am placid - like a river, shimmering in the dolorous sunlight, winding its gentle and inevitable way towards the eternal ocean with a serene restlessness. The pen drops, and the seeds are planted.

To truly feel a thing is to attribute to it a significance beyond all comprehension. To be utterly enveloped in one's own sentiments, for feeling to overcome all thought, is tantamount to drowning; the spurned lover commits suicide because the beast of a human being who performed the act of spurning has taken on a value beyond themselves. They have become the sorry receptacle of dysfunctional dreams, a punching bag for the immature philosophy of those who refuse to abandon hope yet think, feel, behave and, occasionally, even write as though they had attained some wondrous insight into the allegory of life. I pity neither.

Yet, it has never been enough for me simply to love. I am constantly in love; I am besotted by the near-photographic idylls I snap in the blink of an eye and charge with fictitious strands of poetry ripped from the depths of my consciousness. I worship the radiant beauty I once saw and smother it in perfume - no! In the smell of lingering perfume in an unchanged pillowcase - for now I have a fantasy (a memory, the ripest of all grounds for such) contained within a fantasy. That radiant beauty is the heart-wrenching splendour of something which cracked into a thousand pieces before my eyes, before I had so much as laid my hand upon it. So radiant are my thoughts that I convince myself that the loss they represent is as real as the spark which created them; I stagger from place to place tormented by passions I have never felt, kisses I have never received! That I love cannot be denied. Yet the very force of that raw, unbridled feeling - so unbecoming of an introvert like myself - throws itself quite deliberately in front of a train of metaphors and dreams. I think so much that such feelings cannot hope to live long without facing annihilation.

So it is that I punish myself for being human. To contradict one's own sentiments with metaphor, smilie or song - that is the root of Sadness!

The mirror weeps with my shameful reflection. I am thinner than the man Kafka thought he was. I would shatter more easily than the mirror itself!

The immeasurable tranquility of absence, which only night-time can bring, dissolves in the inevitable light of day. My very eyes pound with insignificance; sleeves rolled-up as though I have been at hard at toil, surrounded by books half-open as though half-read, my throat sore from the words which it never allowed to escape.



I take a daudling, redundant pleasure at swivelling, like a tired child, in a broken chair at five in the morning. I think: were I able to slice words from the fabric of my material life, to wire myself at once to the throbbing basslines, the empty roads echoing with faraway vomiting, the hysterical giggles and shrieks of semi-conscious sexual desperation, I would be a Thinker. To wed each separate image through a logic not apparent in the bass, the vomit or the giggling - no; not apparent even in the hysteria itself - in doing so, I would become a Thinker. Yet I am so much more: I have placated myself so far into indifference that the noxious spectacle of life acts itself out on a thousand stages before my eyes. Desolate stages staging plays I have seen a thousand times. I have far too little invested in life to simply think about it.



Life may weave itself into little bundles for the Thinker, but for a Poet, every sense, every word, every colour is itself a bundle throbbing with possibility. Yet, alas, the Poet is more of a Thinker than the Thinker himself. For the Poet decorates his imagination with the embroidery of language, and in doing this he binds himself to the imagination of others, those he has read, as well as the voice of language itself. He translates himself into Poetry, and so perishes his imagination. Rhyme and metre sculpt thought into a monument to the banal as language voluptuously revels in itself and teases us away from thought. The Poet is a Thinker who has nothing to say.

I, too, have nothing to say. Yet, bereft of rhythm and lacking the zest for an amourous affair with life, I cannot hope to structure my thoughts into recognisable hills or trees or lakes. I am no Poet. I write in order to think; like the Poet, I translate myself into a language of my choosing - only mine is the tedious language of modernist warfare. Sometimes I feel as though the most vicious of literary cycles plays itself out in me during these dreadful hours when night slips away; my one true desire in life is to think, and in order to achieve this, I write. Yet, in writing, I don that pretentious top-hat of the caricature of great introverted writing I have fashioned through years of half-baked understanding. I surrender my thoughts the very moment I become aware of them.

I laugh: that conscious inertia of which art was made before we became post-it, that multiple selfdom people abandoned in favour of apathy, is me. I have become a caricature of what I want, a student-led puppet show bursting onto a rickety old stage which once housed Shakespearean tragedy.

The chair stops spinning again and I stretch out my legs so as to dangle them and make myself feel like a child.

I make an art of falling in love.

To pierce the drab monotony of a plastic life and fecundate it with the illusion of purpose or progress! - that is the role of art and the role of love. It is the same. The immutable and absolute immersion in an exterior life, all for itself; the radiant, thronging, cheering and triumphant crowds of memories bursting forth as though crying 'Liberty!' in the face of some tyrant; the intermingling of dreams as though meeting for the first time! To fall in love is to fall into art, I think.

And yet, in spite of the centuries of poems begging for love to please indefinitely, it does not. As it withers, so art itches in between our bones, a perpetual arthritis of the soul. We cherish the suffering art brings us, for it is from suffering that we yearn and from yearning that we fool ourselves. To love is to deify the putrid cadaver of what was lost before it was had. To love art is to deify our Selves, for it is that yearning, borne of suffering the weight of imagination, which springs from us and paints us into that which we see, or feel. Oh, for that imperishable burden to live, to, see, to think, to feel, to skulk home with a can of cider at three in the morning!

Finding art and love irreconcilable, I decided to make one of the other. My love would be Romantic with a capital 'R'; it would exist in thoughts, sheer thoughts bursting at the seams with symbols and meanings only I could ever hope to understand. It would be the Thing above all Things, Sartre's Nauseating roman. My love would thrive on its own negation, and I would seek it everywhere.

And so it is that I find myself staring hopelessly into the abyss. She sits and smiles, smiles and sits as I rise manfully from the slumber of a thousand years of inertia and self-servitude and tear from her blissful presence the cloaked figures of a thousand suitors. From the Heavens, from across the seas I cannot see; from the ditches, from upon the roaring hills, a gargantuan orchestra spills a symphony of all that I never was into a weeping, sighing valley. The wind rips through the endless darkness about me, grips me by the skin, yet on I walk, through my very own symphony and her! Her, above, below, all around -who cares? My parched and stinging lips traipse through a million memories in search of hers and, finding but a nervous smile, quench themselves with the tears of thoughts I have never really had.

I stare hopelessly into the abyss, as she smiles at me in a not unfriendly way.

My soul: a delicate piano melody, snuggling warmly the backdrop of fierce rainfall breaking on a windowpane...

It is not uncommon, should one be inclined to search for me on any given day, to find an old wooden chair supporting my meagre frame in a particular establishment in town. I use the word 'establishment' in order to avoid using the word 'Cafe', for fear of conjuring up images of Paris and leading you, imaginary reader, down conceited streets. The establishment I so frequently frequent is one of many such establishments in the rather odd city into which I appear to have flung myself and not unusual in any respect other than that it is the only one, to my knowledge, to have the word 'Cafe' in its name.

I have become attached to this little building because the first coffee I drank there was one of the best I have ever tasted. Not that I am snobbish in this regard - I can distinguish between good coffee and bad coffee, but little more. No, this one, the first one, tasted (or so it seemed to me) of the girl sat in the corner across from me, her whirling mane winding its lavish way across part of her worried face. I, the stickly flaneur, legs crossed as though preparing for a story about a boot to the groin (such is life), dreamily drinking up the subtle contours of her feline figure, nonchalantly draped across a table. She was Fairtrade.

Yet, I ask myself, how could each of those dreary sips possibly draw from a cup so mundane, so utterly cliched? Cliches, by definition, are prior to reality. They are the sworn enemies of dreams, ever reductive, ever sapping away at our will and our illusions of freedom. I think: the elation of that first cup of coffee was my own fantasy. Whether the girl was beautiful or not, I could not say, but I could say that the snapshot, in my mind's eye, of her languid posture, the vacant brilliance of her autumnal face, partly traced by windswept locks, was itself a motif. It was my own vivid, heaving version of a Gaugin, a Manet bursting at the seams with the imprints my own psychological traumas. My mind had made a masterpiece of that scene, but even now demonstrably lacks the artistry with which to immortalise it in a fragment, or an image. It was the impossibility, that inaccessibility of the beauty I find in art and life, which flowed into me and shocked my central nervous system. The caffeine was stronger that day.

I think: that empty seat mourns the absence of my fantasy. This sickly black dross tastes fouler by the day, yet I each day I return. It is a form of melancholia, such as life, for each day brings that vintage sense of loss - the loss of something I never had, defeat by some unknown force I shall never tame.

Goethe's Fire

Raised in a society in which God was long dead and even the thought of an 'individual' was becoming suspicious at best, it is only natural that I, a charicature of a thinker (think of an exiguous shadow, like in a German Expressionist film, emanating from the figure of a ponce like Wordsworth), should invert my dreamy gaze and question selfhood. I used to believe that the 'self' is simply the image we convey to the world. For me, if I could not apprehend myself, then neither could any other individual. However, that was to evade the point; there could still be a self, even if it lacked a sensible quality. My self could be exterior to me, so I thought, it could exist as a collection of fragments, images, voices, sounds, feelings, expressed by me and captured in the world like flies in a web. I transcended myself in projecting myself into the world.

But the more I attempted to acclimatise to this absence of 'sense of self', the more self-evident it became that self-awareness was too important. How could my legacy of being-in-the-world be exterior to the consciousness which shaped it? In other words, I wished to have some responsibility for my 'self'. Shuddering, as I so often would, as my words drowned in a sea of tedium, battered against the rocks of dialogue and buried beneath a thousand years of cigarette smoke, flannel shirts and apalling music, I reflected on the perceived pretentiousness any utterance in opposition to the binding of my thought might arouse. I shudder at this reflection.

I'm not pretentious. I'm lonely.

Thus, I found that any self I may have could not possibly be exterior to what I thought of it. For surely, my private thoughts about myself cannot be projected into the world. They are mine and mine alone - they are the scraps of evidence that I have been abandoned in the world, that I can even follow this very train of thought, bravely and alone.

I have never assumed myself above or exterior to humanity, so I can only assume that the impossibility of shaking my 'self' from out of myself applies to all. Yet I find myself confronted with a world in which exteriority defines, moulds and creates. I am reminded of a writer, whose name I forget - in which case, I may as well say that I am reminded of a piece of writing, which I also forget. He or it wrote, of Goethe, that landscape was his 'central carrier of meaning'. Young Werther's sorrow spilled out onto the valleys, he or it might have said, inundating the hills, dripping from the branches, seeping into the ditches. I remember how his beloved valley wept for his beloved.

Nowadays, no valley will weep for a broken heart. No spring will blossom in the hearts of the automatons staggering from rotten building to gloomy, rotten building, juggling work, sex and crises like bombs in the greatest circus to be banned for a breach of health and safety regulations. Please, do not misunderstand me; I do not yearn for Goethe's fire, for that rage which burns and tears from within us until it threatens, so we think, to singe the leaves of trees we have never even laid eyes upon. What I would like, if I permitted myself the luxury of desire, would be to understand how others can survive on self-projection. It seems such a silly way of coping with this dirty, ambiguous world.

I have realised that the world is not my canvas, ready for me to project a million instantiations of a self which is not even there, as though I were a creaky old stage consisting of a revolving door of acts, each hell-bent on outperforming the last in some bizarre Cubist experiment. I can't paint myself, not even by accident. The world is too full of sorrow, the sorrow I have invested in it, to even find the room.

Outside, as I write, the rain taps lightly at my window as though knocking politely, imagining me asleep rather than wide awake, describing their endeavour, now twice as fruitless for being mocked. The evening envelops the world, with its street lamps, its clusters of old newspapers and its basslines and, with an almighty shove, pushes the sky away, weeping, like a flooded valley.

The group, or the collective, is the breeding-ground of inanity. Ideas, art, beauty - they are all negated by the lowest common-denominator, the standard around which the group transfixes itself. Words ravish each other before they're spoken. It is the burden of those who think, those for whom life is a dour springboard for the wonder of thought, rather than a wonderful thought bound by dour preservation, to carry; to be forever gagged by the cackle of ignorance and desperation and to be accused, in many quarters, of medicority for stubbornly refusing to submit to it.

Is it not true that a group contradicts its own noise? For all the natter, one cannot hear a single word. Such is our need to be heard in the herd that we abandon thought to the abyss, cast off any semblance of logic and toss words at each other like tomatoes at the Tomatina. We lock ourselves up in our own little festival of forced conversation, of stinking beer breath and sore throats.

We truly are the most absurd species to have ever insulted this planet with its presence. Some would blame Catholicism, but I would go further and suggest that our entire evolutionary process, that apparently beautiful, logical series of steps which led us from caves to bedsits has bestowed upon us a sort of gag reflex, a sense of shame in our own sensibility which causes us to behave more irrationally than any 'animal'. We are petrified of thought and will go to the most obscene lengths to avoid its glare. Rather than form connections with each other, we dilute the fabric of our co-existence with...each other. No authority, no oppressive government, no tyrannical monarch, has ever forced its citizens to huddle together in places where they cannot hear each other in order to express joy. Nobody ever told us we were not allowed to be social animals anymore. We simply convinced ourselves that we evolved out of it.

We evolved the 'group'. The group knaws away at thought in that its exclusivity is self-perpetuating. Contributions must be made to it in order to guarantee an individual's presence; to ignore the concept of the group, to behave as though it were not there, is tantamount to treason. It is, essentially, a horrific form of Communism in which need can be substituted for kinship, shouting for talking, speaking for listening, prose for poetry. In the group, the purpose of speech becomes to take, rather than to give, as the frenetic need for self-preservation becomes all-consuming and individuals realise their value is exceeded by their place within the group. The group is what is wrong with all ideology.

Such is our burning shame and fear of thought that we will undergo the most frightfully dull social procedures in order to avoid it. Drugs and, ultimately, mobile phones, were invented in order to make our sense of timing, our delivery of speech and our style of listening so impeccable that all but the most rigid of group members ultimately drop out.

Result: where once the great seducer was Byron, we now have the man of patience. The man of patience will behave impeccably. He will contribute to the group and he will sip his drink at the most opportune of moments. He will, of course, be endowed with a heroic capacity to engage the group as a whole, as well as its individual members, on a variety of levels, predominantly those generic ones which are acceptable to almost anybody. The man of patience will have no virtues as virtue, in the group, expresses invidiuality without individuality itself becoming a chief concern; it marks the individual out as a threat to the stability of the group. No, the man of patience will be bland. The blank canvas of modernity: everyman. The hero of Eliot, of Joyce, and of the greatest romantic comedies. Dour as dishwater.

Result: where once the great leader will have been a master of oratory, an individual with aura, presence and, crucially, thought, the leader of the group is precisely the opposite: mundaneity. And before the socialists get angry, I am not attempting to suggest that we, as humans, function better when lead; I am suggesting that the group leads itself - not as Marx may have had it. No self-determinism. No freedom. No. The group is personified by the everyman alluded to above. The will of the everyman represents no individual member of the group. It is simply the compromise each individual member accepts as the replacement for true thought.

Were we able to think, we would speak much less. Were we to speak less, we would love more.

Dynamism

I have recently come to the conclusion that it is possible to categorise people in our society along three very simple lines: those to whom others flock, those who flock to others, and people who couldn't care less.

As mediocre beings, there is nothing we despise more than mediocre undertakings. Like Sisyphus, we find in mundane toil the roots of our deepest terror, our complete and utter surrender to blankness. We love ourselves to death, and in death we confront the idea that there is no self to love. All that giddy sweetness, that imperishable bond we so cherish between ourselves and the world - a bond we cherish so much we assume it, depend on it - it all rests on a trap door which, in our darkest hour, surely drops us out of our summery cerebral superstructure (the joy of alliteration is but one more little avenue of pleasure leading away from Truth).

In the banal, we see nothingness. We see our Selves. Like those zealots who tried to silence Galileo, we cling stupidly and, if needs be, aggressively, to the fallacy that everything is in a state of flux but us. We assume our own permanence and a majestic, impenetrable beauty about us. So terrifying is the idea of pause that when we find no beauty in the world, we decide to wander about it (this, I insist, is a tradition that has lead us from the tours of Wordsworth and Shelley all the way to those cretins who justify their existence by having spent six months pretending to be poor on the Indian subcontinent).

Allow me to elaborate by crudely condensing 300 years of Western history into a short story, then applying it to humanity as a whole (were I an academic this would be allowed, and I have much more free time to spend thinking about the world than any academic): once upon a time, we decided we were not the most beautiful thing on the planet. We turned our gaze, instead, to nature. Our finest poets sallied forth, tearing words from the depths of their creative souls and throwing them at nature in a benign effort to justify themselves before her awesome power, revelling in the heightened state of appreciation colliding with the impossibility of doing justice to it; their words would spring, they claimed, from their unique observation of the world around them, words which would lap against each other and fecundate every nook, every cranny with meaning - feeding off the gargantuan idolatry afforded their creators, the poets, by a world more in awe of their madness than their method. Thus, 'Nature', gained a capital 'N' and became female, like all other objects hitherto.

The trouble arose when people began to suspect that the poets were not quite as uniquely placed to worship nature (or Nature) as they claimed. They had made of Nature an intellectual barrier, a creature of such harmony and splendour that it could only have ever been created by humanity; men who had felt divided from themselves, from each other and from their emotional link to the world made an enemy of Nature. In order to defeat it, they found themselves with two options: either control it, or obliterate it entirely. Now, obviously it is quite impossible to obliterate something as abstract as Imagination, that is, the allegory of our material relationship with the world, so it was decided that Nature must be dominated.

So, we invented machines. We reduced the world to all that which we could make of it and found that, with machines, we were all poets. Suddenly, we could all encapsulate the beauty of the world in a word, a gesture, a photograph. We all owned it. It was no longer beautiful (if there is one criticism i can throw at the Marxists it is that common ownership of a thing just makes us not want that thing any longer).


We flocked to Nature, and to the poets. Tired and jealous, we flocked to the machines. Bored, we began to flock to ourselves, a phenomenon I like to call Dynamism.

Historians cream themselves over the 'modernist' period as the age of dynamism, when man wedded himself to machine in the pursuit of progress. And it is indeed true that the world 'got faster'. Technology, wars, medicine, weaponry and stupidity all account for that. However, the fact is we already relished the dynamic. The difference was that before we turned to machines, we found it in the mountains, the clouds, the rivers, the oceans! Thus, already obsessed with movement (for as I have said elsewhere, stasis is tantamount to existence, the ultimate form of reality beyond which consciousness is incapable of seeing), we finally began to create the tools with which to use it.

As I said, everybody can be a poet now. All words are capable of is sculpting ideas into forms; it is the individual imagination which gives them expression. We do not flock towards words. Ironically, however, the forms sculpted by centuries of inherited words, those tired old songs about Nature and machines, it is they who have shaped our flocks. We have built beauty, wit, attraction and inspiration into ourselves. People who flock flock towards the heroes of language, towards those exiguous, skulking ideas which trace the very fabric of our consciousness with their insatiable lust for permanence: they are seduced by Calypso or Byron, overwhelmed by Marinetti or Lenin, exhilerated by Darcy and his wealth. Those lucky enough to personify a form, should thy be happy to do it forever and suspend themselves in-character, command the flocks.

As for those who don't wish to take part in flocking, we are content with the bizarre spectacle of the whole thing. Dynamic crowds of flockers flocking towards dynamic inividuals for some form of gratification. It makes me somewhat nauseous to think of a particular crowd flocking towards some beret-wearing, chain-smoking 'thinker' preaching against that very process of instant gratification in modern culture which allows artists to produce a 'spectacle' by shredding a cow or writing an endless stream of gibberish. Yet it is also somehow amusing to wonder whether the act was deliberate. They are post-modern, I suppose. I am post-caring.

I spend every waking hour yearning for sleep. With every ray of sunshine, with every shadow cast upon my existence, the dull ache of tedium slips in between my bones and stings me with every movement as though every twitch of my finger, every slip of my tongue, were taking place beneath the crushing weight of a giant boulder. The more I wrestle with my burden, the more it crushes me. I find that the most beautiful act of pure selfishness that I can perform is to play dead.

My life: a dreadful, monotonous lullaby.

Love is the heady euphoria which springs from the banal monotony of existence with one's self. It is greater in its magnitude than any so-called 'crime against humanity', it hoists upon the creaking shoulders of an individual forced already to bear the great weight of all humanity the dreams and expectations of another.

If a man desires a Revolution, then write him a song and let him have it.

The sublime weight of the brave humility streaking through Carlos Puebla's music fell, with a splash, into the dripping, ebbing melancholia of my life one evening. I have always envied the musician: a man may scribble away all his days and even reach the pinnacle of literary genius. They can hoist accolades upon his tortured shoulders (if they are free of torture, he has either failed completely, for having not suffered, or he has succeeded all the more, for torturing himself to the point of feeling that torture which he has invented for himself - we have so much to learn from Pessoa), they can cite him as the noblest and most veritable of visionaries. Yet, what has he achieved? A multiply-instantiable collection of inherited symbols. No book has ever existed. Words, like all things, float about the world meaninglessly, seamlessly spilling into and out of each other, lolling around the world as though on the tip of our tongues. What we think they mean is precisely that: what we think. All thought stemming, as it does, from consciousness, I conclude that no words exist (or that they exist, but only as illusions), no words transcend, no words dream. And if no words dream, then neither do books. We dream when we write them, and we dream when we read them. This is especially true of all 'unconscious' writing: what could be more directly the result of a man's consciousness than the aimless unfurling of words from the depths of a soul, a self, which he doesn't have - unfurling, as the banner of self-negation, the ultimate synthesis of his conscious attempts to discover his non-existent self with the matter he substitutes for that impossible unified whole, his memory, which bears the very stamps of the reality he wishes to transcend? Yet, the tortured shoulders of the literary genius receive their massage from the soothing hands of chance, the chance that his dreams have lapped against and seduced our own.

The musician, for his part, conquers us more illusorily (and, thus, more artistically). For the shimmering textures (this is how I can best describe them) of those Cuban guitars danced so merrily, so mournfully against Puebla's implacable voice that I felt myself, consciously, surrender to all that it did not mean and, consequently, all that it could mean for me. This wonderful sound, I realised, sounded like Cuba precisely because it belonged to Cuba. If it belonged to Cuba, and Cuba belonged to its people, then it must be a product of that people's will.

Enthused, I felt a brief but sensational rush - the illusion of having a will of my own - a desire to strike down and tear open the very faces of my enemies. Unable to picture a face, I realised: I have no enemies. Yet still, I felt myself in the grip of that force which meant that nothing but the music was of any matter, nothing but the music existed; I righteously, venomously decided that all those who spurned it should be my enemies. That I should rally the world in that beautiful image of all that those sounds apparenty symbolised in Carlos Puebla and his Cuban cohorts. Hasta siempre, la revolucion!

It was then that I began to wonder: if I have been mobilised by the sheer thrill of the sound, how is that that I can influence others in the same way? For it became sadly evident that the music had mobilised me because I had willingly allowed it to. Nobody forced me to hear it, nobody had tainted it. In even suggesting it to another, I would be corrupting it, stamping upon its pure elegance all of the drab and inconsequential exteriority which I present to the world, the other, whom I wished to conquer with it.

I smiled: how could any Revolution occur without music, or without art? I thought (and still think) it absurd to attempt to construct society in my own image when my image is itself so hopelessly diffuse. Revolutionaries seldom realise (though they still expect, which is rather different) that only force will conquer tyranny, and only force will keep it at bay. So it follows that the forceful overthrow of any tyranny will be essentially forceful, and forceful - tyrannical - in its self-preservation. Any conscious individual knows that a Revolution is not a Utopia - it is merely a hint of what it could be. Utopias are effervescent assertions the reality, of dreams and, as such, they are products of the transcendent imagination. Ideology alone has no hope of suggesting them.

Therefore, what does Puebla's music have to do with tyranny? One might say it combats the tyranny of non-music, of oppression by blandness and uniformity. But how? It is this question, and its lack of any possible deterministic or rational answer, which leads me to believe that revolution is an instance of art. The Revolutionary seeks to overcome the stifling material conditions of his existence and, in so doing, he must create an alternative. No Revolution can ever reasonably live up to its name, for the tyranny it seeks to annihilate (or better, overturn) is unique; if it is unique, it must be different from all other tyrannies. If there are different tyrannies, there can be no Form of tyranny - and there can be no Form of opposite. The opposite of oppression is whatever the conquering Revolutionary makes of it, whatever Utopia drives it. Whatever it sounds like.

I was content. My imagination throbbed with the face of Che, of sunny Cuba, of righteous expressions of freedom, happiness and tolerance. I was transported from the world in wave after wave of indolent joy. A Revolution had occurred in my heart and, just for a moment, I had overcome tyranny. I had my revolution and, in writing, I dreamed it all the more.

Yo soy esto que soy, un simple trovador que canta.

Prelude to the Manifesto of Sadness

I stare, despairingly and disparagingly, into the sodden essence of things.

The world has abandoned me because, rather than return its glassy-eyed gaze with the thousand-mile stare of conscience, I shyly looked away and surrounded myself with the highest form of all reality - dreams. In turn, I abandoned the world because it stubbornly refused to let me go.

I am incapable of detachment. Like an irritating (and, potentially, highly embarassing) moth which has settled on my shoulder and refuses the sternest of coaxes, life nibbles away. Perhaps it would be better to say that I abandoned the world because with every rational step I took towards it, I sunk further into the quicksand of metaphor and allegory. All matter repulses me, all life is a film-set. Unable to accept the world on a rational basis, I took shelter in words. Words, those imperious bastions of potential, erected, who knows how, against wave after wave of consciousness, the self-perpetuating sadness of the world. Yet even then, I found that in their employment, the words led me all the way back. Those waves of consciousness had eroded them, torn them up into a brand new landscape of their own making. The most wondrous allegory, the most joyous of all stories, the tallest of tales fizzled out before my eyes and shrank into a pathetic whimper which the Universe never answered back. Indeed, I had told myself the very tallest of tales.

Thus, unable to accept the world rationally, by which I mean through perception, interpretation, or involvement - through consciousness - and, finding that the medium of words was itself but one more metaphor for nothingness, I retreated yet further into myself. A retreat which resulted in my discovery that to venture beyond consciousness was to forego all knowledge. To forego all knowledge was simply to be, to build a golden palace of inertia amid the drubbery of Life.

Yet, even here, I found no release. For, in my loneliness, I found that it was precisely in my failure to apprehend the Universe, rationally or irrationally, that I was wired to it. My golden palace was resplendent with the finest treasures of the imagination, the calm acceptance of the incomprehensible, the absence of the chasm between reality and fiction through the knowledge that, instead of existing to substantiate one another, neither even existed. Yet I had cut myself off from the very ground upon which I had built my palace; my yearning for transcendence had been, all the while, rooted in the realisation that the conceptual is but a bastardised step from the actual - that my thoughts were subject to my subjectivity. In hiding, I had reified myself. Subject only to myself, I was the object of noone and nothing but myself. I had negated myself. I had become like everybody else.

Someday, somebody will read these half-baked expositions of the weightiest of feelings and pass judgement. They will deconstruct my own deconstruction of myself and find nothing. They will catalogue my scribbled, scattershot bits and pieces - properties of my Being to myself, bouts of social dis-integration to others - and stamp upon it the authority of their own interpretation, their Symbolic Order of all that I never was. I shall cease even to 'Be' and to exist as the bastard child of all those wasted hours which bred to form all of which constitutes this, my Manifesto of burning and overwhelming sadness.


I am incapable of deatchment. Life nibbles away.

A Brief Refutation

Hypocrite - derived from the Greek word for 'feigning or 'play-acting', 'hypokrisis' - associated with 'hypokronai' ('I play a part').



Augusto Neto ( http://i-dontthink.blogspot.com/ ) accuses me of hypocrisy. He accuses me, therefore, of holding or expressing conflicting opinions, opinions which I may or may not have. In either case, he accuses me of lying.



To this, my refutation is simple (or infinitely complex): Everything that is 'thought' is an illusion. To think of something is to negate it, to deny its very right to 'be', for 'being' is anterior to conscience and it is from conscience that all thought must stem. Each thought, as a product of conscience, must ultimately be a product of Being. If 'I' possess any right to exist whatsoever, it is not as a supreme construction of all my thoughts (what a vile mess 'I' would be in then!). Such an argument cannot be justified, as to justify anything, according to the standard I have just set, would be to acknowledge its existence. It is a basic metaphysical paradox. Playing various parts is simply my way out.



Augusto Neto accuses me of being irrational; so be it. The more 'rationally' he behaves, the more his Being allows itself to be drowned by consciousness - the more he believes he 'emerges into existence' - the more he negates himself. The more he 'thinks', the more he imagines himself. And such a rational mind can never hope to imagine too much; never can it even hope to burst the seams of its own artificial scenery.



It could be said that I could imagine him better than he can himself; it could even be said, that I have made him up.