Posts Tagged ‘My Journey’

A Mean Bugger

You thought I was mean, and it has taken a long time for me to disagree.

Yes, I avoid pissing my money down the drain by drinking alcohol, or burning hours of labour by smoking. And why should I eat out when I can cook my own food? Why pay for someone else’s house when I want to create my own beautiful dwelling?

It has taken me a long time because finding my roots needed the courage it takes to dig and lay bare my origins. And I grew out of people of the land, people in low places with shrewd eyes, people who were victimised by state and church. Those eyes watched to see how those in power tried to keep them poor through their own weaknesses and despair — work all week for those who pay you, and who then take your money back because your misery leads to drink. It doesn’t matter if it is misery or pride. They profit from both.

My people passed that on to me. Some people called it religion. You know the rules, “Don’t go with prostitutes! Beware of sexual temptations. Don’t steal. Be frugal!”

But I know it’s not religion I inherited. It’s the code of survival amongst powers who try to keep you poor, who grow rich on the weaknesses of the common herd, who manipulate and hold dearly to their power and take your money back in every way they can.

It’s not meanness.

It is awareness.

Journey Inward

And I ventured into myself,
Becoming the while like a tiny infant
Curled within my mothers womb.
Back I went to the doorway
Of the great dark,
And looked upon it,
And knew that beyond it I was no more.
To enter in was to lose myself,
Become as things were before I was created.
And I looked upon that void
And saw nothing,
Yet knew I had emerged from it
And would be called back in death.
So gently I dropped into that abyss
Ready to be dissolved in that emptiness
And scattered like dust in the wind.
For in me was a knowing
That the darkness had brought me forth,
And though I be scattered as grains of sand,
Yet that which gathered me once
From the trackless shores of the void,
Can call me together out of the darkness,
Waking my essence from the night of its bosom,
And live again in the world.

Isn’t There Anything Else?

I walked on Combe Martin beach this morning
With my dog Tramp.
The only other person on the footpath
Around the rocks
Was the local Baptist Minister.
I was in a thoughtful mood, noticing things.
And what took my attention was
That not once did the vicar meet my eyes,
Even though at one point we were
Only three feet apart and I was facing him.
Did this mean that God was ignoring me?
Or was I ignoring God?
I had been ready to meet Him,
But apparently nobody was home.

So much has dropped away from me of late.
Desire for money,
Motivation to be anything,
Belief in an external God.
Even my usual defences have melted.
That’s what happened
To me when I discovered
I haven’t any meaning,
And there’s no real point in existence.
Not that I have feelings of suicide.
Just that the illusions
We usually give ourselves meaning with
Have dropped away.
Or perhaps I have seen
What a show shadow show they are?

I wonder if this is what it feels like
To drop out, to give up.
But I don’t feel like that.
I know there isn’t any reason,
Any God to give me purpose.
But it is a state of beauty,
To stand alone in the midst of
This grand mystery and opportunity
We call Life,
And know that life within me
Is my strength, my God,
And my infinite potential.

Jackie and Steven were on the beach
As I walked back toward home.
I felt relaxed and open,
Talking with them.
Jackie was carrying her child on her back.
Then she moved the sling,
And I knew she wanted me to look
At the baby she had helped create.
Some people would call
Jackie and Steven dropouts.
But they looked me in the eye
And shared who they were with me.

At home I realise I am
Searching for myself.
At least God,
Desire for money,
Fame, or sexual conquest,
Give a meaning and direction.
Without them,
What is left?
Feeling so empty
Leaves me wondering
At the smallness of my life.
Isn’t there anything else?
Is this it?

The house is empty.
I sit listening to music.
Suddenly I remember a dream
From several years ago.
A monolithic stone of huge dimensions
Rises up from the earth.
It was unfashioned except at the top,
Where a strange and beautiful design
Was worked on it.
I had never understood this dream,
But now I knew with certainty
The great stone represents a human life,
Raw and natural except at the top,
Where conscious endeavours have left their pattern,
Making a wonderful blending of nature and individual will –
Of the unconscious and conscious.
I am that Rock
Shaped by the unimaginable ages
And rising up out of the earth
To stand erect
By my innate strength.
And I am of the very substance
Of the Cosmos.
My personal strivings
Leaving their art
Indelibly in the
Rock that is life.

Wonderful!
Wonderful – and yet.
And yet I feel so lost!
Why?
I feel angry because
There is nothing to hope for.
Without God
There isn’t any light except myself.
And although I see that –
I don’t want it.
I don’t like it.
It was so much more comfortable
To have a mother or father
To come and make me happy –
Or a God to look to for salvation.

And I –
Well – I
Am cynical and unhappy,
Not wanting to move
Out of the habit of waiting for
Mother, Father, God
To direct me,
To bring me joy.
I want something outside of me
To give me meaning.
To stimulate me.

And I –
Well – I
Won’t let my light shine
If I have to do it all myself.
It is so difficult to let go of childhood,
And BE oneself.
Then I remembered Jackie and Steven on the beach,
Realising how they had looked at me
Like I was some sort of father.
Well – with five children I am.
But I don’t want to be a father anymore,
Giving people things to do,
Acting as strength for them.
Yet people need attention
Or direction,
Just as children do.
Is that what the minister does?
So why didn’t he look at me?

I turned the music off.
It was a distraction,
An outside noise.
But its absence didn’t help.
So I walk upstairs
And take all my clothes off
Standing naked before a mirror
Wondering who I am.
My body looked hard and lean,
As if I had been working hard of late.
And my right arm,
The hardest worker of all,
Hangs heavy and big,
Like a powerful piece of equipment
Or a tool I carry about.
My arms reminded me of
The great claws the fiddler crabs have,
One larger than the other.

Then I got into bed.
If I can no longer
Look to mother, father or God,
Or even circumstances to give me direction,
I must discover who I am,
And what shit or glory
I carry inside me.
And what hits me immediately
Is that I want to suffer.
Nobody is going to take that away from me.
No bugger can stop me suffering.
It’s mine to have if I want it.
I guess I am like a kid
Whose lollipop has been taken away.
I can’t have the fairy tale world I wanted,
So now I am going to sulk and suffer
Just to make you unhappy.
Strangely – there is only me here.

Oh yes –
That was the world I lived in.
I lived in a fairyland,
Tiny tots sort of place,
With a storybook happy ending.
Looking back,
I have an image of myself
Appearing so lavender and lace and gentle.
I was trying to be so beautiful.
But what a lie,
And how castrating!
As a youth in London
I had seen so much suffering around me
I had shut it out by going into the beautiful and spiritual.
Everything was okay really because God
Had a happy ending to this fairy story of life,
Even if we had to find it at death or in future lives.

Now the doors within me began to open,
And I could see
How I had closed my eyes to the suffering in the world,
My own suffering, and other people’s.
I felt I could never find a plot to write about,
But everywhere is an expression of a plot.
There is Polly, killing her husband,
From the inside,
Then suffering guilt and destroying herself with it –
Other men giving her sexual pleasure,
A momentary relief from her guilt.
There is Angela, an old woman,
Frustrated and lost in her thoughts,
In her philosophy, her make-believe.
For some obscure reason hiding
Her desire to be fucked and touched.
And underneath it all saying –
“Touch me – fuck me.”
All the people I have ever met are stories.
My own life, with my hiding from reality,
My avoiding sexuality and responsibility.
My flights into fairytale land,
So I wouldn’t see the human suffering around me,
Or know the violence and desires in me.

But as with the mirror,
I am now standing naked
In front of myself – and I can see!
I see the drama of human passion
As it is enacted daily
In marriage, work, politics.
In religion, riots and war.
Underneath the surface actions
Rage the desires –
Raw, urgent and powerful.
I see we are slaves to these
Incredible forces,
Driving us like gods
Making puppets dance.
They lead us into soul-destroying work,
Hateful relationships, even murder.
And I see how those live
Who prey upon us.
Delicately or brutally manipulating
Our desires, fears and dreams.
When I look at the human animal,
We are not a pleasant sort of creature.

For some reason I remember
My youngest son, Quentin.
When my father died,
Quentin came with me to view my dad’s body.
I had said to Quentin,
“We are going to look at grandpas body.”
Afterwards I asked him what he thought.
He immediately said,
“That wasn’t grandpas body.”
I thought he had rejected dads’ death
And was going to fantasize,
So I asked him what it was then.
“That was grandpa,” he said.
I guess Quentin faces reality
More head on than I do.
Recently Quentin watched the Muppets on TV.
One, in the form of a monster,
Gobbled up another one.
This scene stayed in Quentin’s mind for ages,
And he sang the song,
“I’ve got you under my skin.
I’ve got you deep in the heart of me,”
That the monster sang.
Quentin, even though it frightened him,
Was facing the reality
Of creature devouring creature.
Our small turtle,
That swallows other small creatures alive,
Has illustrated this to him recently.
Perhaps I have noticed such things in him
Because of my own difficult adjustment to reality.

Reality though, is a minor problem.
I couldn’t even accept
Myself as a man.
I didn’t want to see
My animal lust,
My violence, and treachery,
Or that I was castrated.
Pilate might just as well
Have asked of Jesus,
“What is reality?”
“Who are you?”
Or more to the point,
“Who am I?”

The question releases a mass of desire,
And I experience vivid sexual fantasies
About several women.
One person, I feel, wants it up the rectum,
Because it isn’t nice having straight sex.
So I agree, but manage straight sex
By saying, lets sin and do something to wallow in.
The others just want it straight in.
In this I know the primacy of sexual desire,
And know that I can have many women,
With just a little concern over their sensitivities.
Without that sensitivity,
Whether as manipulator or manipulated,
The poor fragile ego
Could be damaged or shattered.
Isn’t that what is happening?
How many people do you know who
Are needing medication, alcohol
Or street drugs such as fags,
To make it through the day?
You must break gently through
To those basic urges.
And with this
My body arched
And moved with sexual pleasure
Until I experienced an orgasm
Deep in the images of a woman’s body.

Breakthrough!
I felt, I saw, I experienced
A magnetic pull, or flow,
A vibration throughout the universe.
After my orgasm my genital area
Was experiencing the
Continuous buzz of this pleasurable vibration.
Everything is separate in time and space
Like separate pieces of sand or iron filings,
Yet the invisible vibration
Moves each separate being
Into an expression of this overall tone,
This trembling, just like sand forms patterns
When a note is played,
Or filings form the patterns of the magnetic force.

And it is this buzz, this zzzzzzzt,
Leading people to mate and long and love.
The buzzing fills me
And is singing – AUM.
I can feel it
In every tiny cell.
I can feel the zzzzztt vibrating
And living in me as pleasurable sensation,
And in being aware of it
Come to know the universe,
The fundamental condition,
Had at one time learned to zzzztt –
And so liked it, that throughout existence
It continued everywhere
And in an amazing variety of ways
To zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt!
I am that buzz, that AUM made flesh.
Yet I am what?

A quest rose in me.
What is the basis of my being?
Am I the sperm,
The sexual act?
The buzzing flow
Is an expression of the root of my being,
But is not that thing itself.
I don’t know how to make this clearer,
Because the basis of my being was, I felt,
Eternally unknowable,
Yet eternally experienced as Myself.
I could go mad trying to know what I am –
Yet I AM forever THAT.
And I know that all form, all relationships,
Animal variety, sexual variation, longing,
Waiting, caring for offspring,
Is an expression and exploration,
A bubbling up, tumbling, playing,
At buzzing – the AUM.
Everything wants to zzzzzzzz.
The sexual longing I feel
Is this fundamental buzz as expressed by me.
It is like a slight out of phase current,
A feedback, or disharmony in basic being,
Like in an amplifier causing a hum.
I don’t have the necessary concepts
To explain in any other terms
What I am experiencing.
But I feel the basic being,
Not A basic being,
Learned to do this,
And liked it so much it continued.
This basic situation had once been a totality,
But had learned to separate itself into polarities.
These polarities created tension
That was released when the polarities came together,
As in sexual relationship,
Or the flash of lightning.
And the universe so likes this
It does it over and over again.
Oh fuck!

I once read that linseed oil molecules actually learn.
They respond to light quicker
At a second and third exposure,
Or something of that nature.
Perhaps that is purely chemical/biological –
Isn’t the brain?
And what is the learning process?
Anyway, the universe liked buzzing
After it discovered how to do it.
And living creatures, their form and sex,
Arose out of its continuance.
This buzzing penetrates all matter
Like an all-pervading hum,
I can feel it now in my being.
I can see how all creatures,
All tumbling, sweating, loving, laughing,
Born and dying humanity
Are an expression of this fundamental zzzzzz.
I see how all conscious life is unknowingly
Living out this great buzz,
Like the iron filings moving into position,
Or sand dancing in the vibration of music.

Yet each man or woman fails
To deeply acknowledge
How they are a fragment
Tossed up on the great buzz.
Whether we like it or not we zzzzz,
Or are involved in buzzing.
We rationalise it, or claim it as ours personally,
We deny it, channel it, forbid it.
We symbolise it religiously.
We fear it, murder it, chase it,
Or attempt to forget it.
But it is all buzz – the AUM.
What seems to us as choice,
Are usually magic lantern shows.
Shadows.
Is that it?
Isn’t there anything else?

Those questions had burned in me for years.
Underground seams of coal,
Hot, flaming, trapped heat
In me seething.
Is there nothing else in human nature
Except buzzing, except being enslaved
By passions and primal urges from the great buzz?
Must we be forever lost in the illusions we use
To cover up how we are merely vibrating fragments
Of sand in the great impersonal buzz?
Is there something more than
Manipulating the urge in others
To buzz, to fuck,
To find a safe place,
To have a shelter from fear
And experience love?
Must we forever profit from the
Vulnerable humanness of others?
Must we remain sheep in the hands of the manipulators?
Is that it?
Isn’t there anything else?

A flash of insight into my own youth arose.
I was trying to be so spiritual,
Yet at the same time dealing with homosexuals.
I profited by selling pictures of young men to them.
At sixteen I acted as an agent for Ray
To visit a German homosexual.
But I didn’t want to see how I could manipulate.
Unconsciously I knew human weaknesses,
Through my own weakness.
Immersed in the life in London as a youth,
Surrounded by homosexuals,
Prostitutes, thieves,
Ordinary men and women in their millions,
I unconsciously realised
That unless I could gain some measure of control
Over my own desires, fears, and urges,
I would be at the mercy of others
Who may be unscrupulous in abusing me,
Using sex like a baited hook.
So for survival I struggled
To learn how to control my own urges.
That gave me the edge with others.
It is a powerful thing to have the same weakness,
But be in control of it.
Then you can play another person like a puppet.
Knowing this, I saw, with a flash,
How, because I appeared so clean and spiritual,
I attracted people.
They desire to be free of that ever persistent buzz.
They want to find liberation and happiness.
And that is another direction manipulation takes,
Using the force of their desire.

This is the story of the holy man who,
Representing this freedom and purity,
Suggests to those who come to him,
That purity comes by avoiding the desire to fuck.
How pure and high and holy he is.
Yet restrained desire builds up like a power,
And where that power flows –
To the guru – money flows.
So flows millions of dollars.
Have you seen the marble temples in India
Built with the mighty dollar?

And the images rolled on and on.
The Pope and all the heads of religion,
Living in palaces.
What strange humanity that is.
What wonderful manipulators.
But isn’t there anything else
In this crazy world?

I guess even my bicep
Is a symbol of strength.
Strength to hold, to protect,
To fuck, to hurt if not compliant.
This great thick arm I was seeing in the mirror
Is like the crab displaying his claw,
Saying look at my power.
It’s like a wrench or spanner
You hang on the side of your body.
Mine has slightly twisted my body
Because it is so heavy.
Useful though, like a mechanic’s tool.
So I know I can manipulate others if I choose to.
I have the symbol of dominance,
The strong arm and strong body,
With the alert mind.
But is that what I want to do?
Dominate?
If not –
What do I want to do with my life?

I see that while I hide so many urges from myself,
Such as lust, desire to manipulate, fear, and pride,
I cannot see those things clearly in others.
But if I avoid the manipulation,
The using other people’s dreams, and fear,
Their hopes and weaknesses for personal profit,
What is left in this world?
There is enslavement of others,
Manipulating them to their detriment,
And there are those who,
While an animal themselves,
Yet have regard for others.
So is there another side to humans?
Is there something else
Other than being lost in defences, illusions and fears?

What is this other thing?
I can see that in the past I felt towards
This mysterious ‘other’ quality
That I must have that too.
Not only a muscular arm,
And the power over
My own urges and weaknesses.
In teenage I recognised that
I must have dominion over myself.
It was seen unconsciously, instinctively,
Like an animal might
That had to survive in that situation.
I saw it was necessary
If I was going to survive in the world.
So I fought for it, developed it,
Just as I fought and struggled to develop a strong body.
There are so many paths one could take.
I see I have justified my own strengths,
My masculinity, sexuality,
And my relationships with various women,
On the grounds that within my territory
I would give them freedom.
I offer you freedom under my dominance.
Is what I was really saying.
I would not enslave them by their weakness.
What a preposterousness standpoint.
What I would really be saying was
I will give you freedom
If I can have sex with you.
But what would really be happening was
That I would be the prisoner of my own lust.
They would be manipulating me by the balls.
As I said to Quentin afterwards
About a picture in one of his comics,
The hero saves the woman
And she keeps him as her pet.
He laughed like mad,
But Leon said, “That is not funny.”

So I come back again to the question – what else?
I still feel my penis is a channel for a river of life.
It is flowing all the time.
And underneath the flow
I feel the basic reality, from which all else arises.
All else is a sort of fantasy, a weaving or playing.
So I ask myself what that reality is,
And I stumble upon a deep stratum,
As an archaeologist might stumble
Upon a great tomb.
And in this tomb I find the relics of a hero
Who gave himself in sacrifice for his people.
As I touch his bones deep in myself,
I sense – or perhaps remember –
That humanity in its history,
Came upon a terrain in its development,
Where it didn’t have the qualities necessary to go on,
To develop further.
We knew in our dreams,
In our unconscious, what those heroic qualities were
That were needed.
But the dreams had not incarnated
Into actual ability in the race.
So there we were,
Stuck in the bog of our own petty grasping.
And as I touched those holy bones
I was that hero, that heroine.
Over and over I experienced
The drama of being a sacrifice.
I as the hero expressed the new conception,
The new consciousness,
The new way of life,
I was beaten and smashed to death
Because I was a threat
To the old instinctive order.
But the fragments of my strewn body,
My flesh, were eaten by those who had killed me.
And my flesh was like Seeds
That grew within those who devoured me,
And became in them the new awareness
They had sought to destroy.
I was a willing sacrifice.
I knew that through the stress
And ritual of my willing death,
I would receive the new consciousness
And bring it to my people.

And so I stand before them,
Laughing at their fear of death,
The tiny world of mind they live in.
And I – I have flown now like an eagle
Into a great expanse of spirit –
Released by my willingness to die,
To let my past self crumble,
As it must if we are to move on.
And my laughter frightens them as they break me.
But it is the seeds of their redemption.

I released my hold on the holy bones.
What an amazing experience,
To know the past of my race.
To understand the turning point
Where we stood on the edge of self-awareness
And held back.
And the coming of a Messiah
Gradually broke into the age of
Lust and slavery.
It was not ‘a’ Messiah.
For I had seen the Messiah,
The Saviour,
The Avatar,
Was a dream, a longing,
A sure knowledge of our need
Growing in each of us.
A need we were all trying
To give birth to
For our own deliverance –
And we are trying still!
But there were some who lived it.
And with their lead
We have hope to
Move beyond ourselves,
Just as I am trying to
Move beyond myself today.
But we must die to do that.
I must become my own Messiah,
Take on the life of Krishna,
And bring into this body
Another type of awareness,
That I, that mankind
Have been struggling for so long.

This is the mystery
Of the birth of Christ
This is why there is no real historical Jesus.
You and I are it.
For the age of slavery is still upon us.
Slavery to our fears,
To old habits and outworn social codes;
Slavery to work and money –
Drudge to sexual need,
To figures of authority
And the money they demand.
We are slaves,
And this order must die,
And we with it.
But here I am,
Still wondering what to do with my life.
Every cell in me still buzzing
With the life of me.

For I am the eternal AUM
And know at last what I had read
And never before understood or agreed with.
It doesn’t matter in the least
That mankind go on procreating.
Our physical life is only a bubble,
A twist of sand following the course of the wind.
The reality is the wind.
And the wind exists
Whether the sand follows its course or not.
Knowing my essence I know
It doesn’t matter whether I exist.
And that brings me to a crossroads.
I have become a sanyasin.
All that I so treasured has been dropped.
Not in strong willed renouncement,
But in easy letting go
By seeing the emptiness and illusions
Of what I had so treasured.
Sex, children, work, fame, money –
They are all now, as motivators, without reality.
They are all real things.
But with this wider view of no real self,
Of there being only the motiveless
Flux of swirling energy/awareness,
Behind which was nonbeing,
It all seems so shallow and pointless.
And I have lost nothing.
This personality –
What is it?
A muddle of desires and opionions.
Pains and hopes,
Habits and fears.
Nothing permanent or wondrous
To grasp so tightly.

But I had always thought and felt
That to leave everything,
Becoming a sanyasin,
Was the renouncement
Of one inducement or reward (the worldly),
For a greater more eternal reward,
The spiritual awareness.
But now, as I stand at this Crossroads,
Having left everything behind,
There is no inducement whatsoever ahead.
But I must find out if this is true.
For that is the nature of ego,
It must forever test its limits
Until it knows for certain of its non-existence.
And so I walk this Mountain Path
To find out where it leads.
Still a hope for God,
For that grand resolution in ecstasy
That will transform me into an angel of delight.

So I climb up that path
Coming to an edge, a precipice.
And beyond – beyond –
Is a vastness incomprehensible;
An ever moving sea of cosmic swirl.;
Without centre, without goal,
Without beginning or end –
IT IS.

And I –
I want to run back to the foot of the path,
And hammer there a notice saying –
Abandon hope all ye who enter here!
For everything is taken away here at this edge.

Instead I sit upon the ground looking into the void.
Sit, as I know, so many have before me.
Sit, empty of trying, of searching, of hoping.
Sit in complete abandonment of motivation.
There was no ahead, no reward, no goal.
There was only the recognition that
What I had so sought in the past,
In the world and in spiritual goals,
Were of no account, illusions.
And in my emptiness came – Bliss.
It was the joy of freedom
From all that had held me in thrall.

And I stayed pondering these things a long-time,
Going deep into myself again and again,
Looking at my being, seeing clear consciousness,
Experiencing my state of just being –
Sat Chit Ananda –
Being – Consciousness – Bliss.
I sat reviewing the possibilities of life.
I could stay in the game,
As the rhyme says –
On the bridge stood the duke of Buckingham,
Watching – the stunts of the cunts in the punts,
And the tricks of the prick’s that were fuckin ‘em.
Or I could, as I had seen earlier,
Continue to create my own suffering.
Perhaps you know the feeling –
“Sod it. If the universe isn’t about anything,
Then I’m not going to fucking well play!
If it’s not about something,
With some reward somewhere,
Then I’m not going to get fucking well involved.”

But from my new perspective
I laughed at myself over this.
There is just consciousness.
I am the creator,
And if I want to be miserable – great!
If that’s what I want to be – I can go ahead and be it.
This freedom gives me the ability
To be what I want to be,
Without all the hassle.

Slowly another possibility clarified –

Freedom within limitation.
An amazing sense and experience
Of this freedom came upon me.
It was more rewarding than
Any strange spiritual experience,
And it has infinite possibility.
Life could begin in an entirely new way.
Relationships could be things of depth,
Of variability, and beauty,
Once freed of the shackles of the eternal desire to fuck.
Yet sex is not forbidden.
And work can become a joy and a game,
Instead of a struggle and a task.

I have got the key to the universe.
In its simplest form,
The key is the recognition
That thoughts, emotions and feelings
Are never anything to do with reality.
To mistake our thoughts and emotions
For reality enslaves us
As surely as if we were locked behind thick prison bars.
So I do not have the key in any
Space travel, science fiction, futuristic sense.
But as an open door to exploring my possibilities
Within the realm of what is real.
This is a great gift, but I am only on the very fringes of it.
Perhaps my journey will enter me into it further?

Art by Caroline Atkinson

I Share Life

I see a man
Who has been broken several times,
And yet has somehow managed
To stand again.
I see a man who
Has been full of anger and misery,
And has tried to cleanse his temple.
I see a man who is listening,
And trying, without great pride,
To live in the way of love.
I see a man
Who remembers
What it was like
To be broken,
And to have nothing.
This is the man who reaches
To take your hand;
Who looks into your eyes,
And says –
I share life with you.
I was pierced – I share life with you.
I was broken – I share life with you.
I am alive – I share life with you.
In as much as you love one another,
I share life with you.

I Am Stop the Wind

Tony wrote this just after having a stroke and had lost the power of speech

Darling
I sense you feeling in a new pathway
in your footpath
your foot and
your heating in your sole.
You will
giving the trackway
and your breathless
as it follows.

There are only colours and
tries that we collect
from the many thinksing
ine our way.

Now the wind move
and I am stand
in the darkness and quietness.

I see what a
emotions whirling about
in frigtened.
I see the hands
and faces
as them
small by we all.

And I takes their hands
and held them cross to me.
For that it we tell us if our life.

If that is love,
then I take it
and it give and take
and another
not time also.

Home to Myself

Here was my home.
And the garden gate,
When opened, led inside me.
It was a shock,
With some pain,
To suddenly see myself spread
Across the garden,
Naked for all to see.

I stood, holding the gate, staring.
There to my right,
The bare track across
The tiny lawn
Shouted of my laziness.
Etched each time
I shortcut from the path.

The front door too, was me.
Every scratch on its bubbling paint
A part of my life,
Scrawling my condition.
Taking me through
Deeper into myself.

Inside,
My weaknesses revealed.
In every chair
And bare floorboard,
My life uncovered,
Revealing my preoccupation
With myself,
Humbling me.

Humbling too my wife
And children
There to meet me.
No matter who I was
They loved me,
Each one with
Something to show,
Or ask.

Mark wanted food.
Neal quivered his nose
Mysteriously.
A car engine, he said.
(How did he do that?)

Helen I held close.
She told me
We were both
Number one triangle
On the fire-guard.

There was a lot
I could not be proud of.
But there was a light
In the kitchen,
The dog had a welcome,
The children shone,
My wife had stayed.
It was a home.

Heartland

This is the story of a man.

I am that man.

Like any other man I was first an infant and child, and it was during my childhood the robbery, or was it loss, occurred. Things went from me quietly and secretly which left me impoverished, but I was unknowing. Spells were laid upon me which took from me an authority I deserved but never claimed. So that when I reached manhood I had no awareness of my bereavement. I was a man of steel, guarded against all that might have told me. For fifty weeks a year I could rise at 6.30 to work, leave home not to return until evening. In the remaining two weeks of the year I could rest with my family and barely feel the pangs of regret and the intuition of a coloured world seen momentarily through the camera shutter, and lost when the next year of unremitting work began.

Marriage was no anxiety or burden of responsibility for me. Why should it be when I could marry a woman without the complications of emotion and feelings. There was no jealousy or hurt, there was no dependence or cares. And together we made children, beautiful straight limbed children with shining golden hair, who I robbed as I had been robbed – in the darkness.

Yes, of course there was darkness and clouds. But if you live in a country where there is little sun you accept it. We live in an age where awful ugly things are given polite names, where dark things are seen as good. When a woman leaves her baby to be cared for by someone else, and never puts her baby to her breast, it is given the polite name of economic necessity. When we build houses that are not created out of consideration for human beings, but out of how much profit can be made, we call it market forces. When a person exhibits homosexual behaviour which in an animal would be seen as signs of non-functioning, we rationalise and support it. When tens of thousands of people show massive symptoms of fear and alienation regarding their social environment, and consume saleable products such as alcohol, tobacco and sedatives to cope, we do not look at our environment and see it as a source of disease, we allay the symptoms in the sick. We are SO polite. So polite that when savages roam the streets and monsters from nightmares sit in public places we defer to them.

I was brought up to be polite. I was trained to say please and thank you, even for things I hated. I was encouraged to show pleasure in meeting people who were tainted and abhorrent. I was taught to fear too. I used to think fear was a tool of religion, in which the damnation of an eternal hell was promised unless one supported a group of men who lived in ease from the earnings of fear. But fear also sells tablets and whisky, it sells health policies and safe foods. Fear is big business. It is promoted today more than ever.

So how do you catch a thief who robs you of confidence? How do you catch the robber who steals away your ability to feel emotions? What does the criminal look like who pilfers ones ability to think for oneself and in doing so shapes the mind to have narrow boundaries and believe only in what is commonly believed? If it was just one person you might catch them and kick them in return for their brutality to ones spirit. But some things were taken which I didn’t even know were missing. Who can you blame then?

Was it the nurses who, to anaesthetise my child body despite my screams and struggles held me down, and through my battle and cries subdued me – creating in me not only a fear that, despite begging, despite craven calls for help, other human beings could continue terrible activities upon me, but also that my deepest pleas could be felt to be of no consequence, that I as a person mattered little to others of my species – was it the nurses who thieved my trust in other human beings from me?

It is difficult too, when you have a penis evident between your legs, to believe that in some way it has been ripped off, dismembered, pinched. How could it have been taken while it is still there? Some people still walk around but they are dead. When you walk past some of the elderly in clothes freshly worn from the dry cleaners, who smell of talcum powder, who’s hair is so neatly barbered, who’s body looks as if it is laundered several times a day, don’t you ever feel fear? Don’t you have a suspicion they are actually already dead? The ability to love and hate has gone from them. The living impulse that could make them snarl or defy someone, to do something outrageous or splendid has gone. So my penis – no, the full longing, the beautiful belly lusting hunger – had been crippled.

I could fuck, just like the walking dead can walk. I fathered children. But without a living penis I hated sex. It always made me feel how dead I was, and how frightened of death. There were terrible days. Being castrated and left to wander in public was a pillory I didn’t feel I deserved. It was all the more cruel because I still had the physical member which led me to hope, to try again, to meet death, and run once more. The descriptions in books about sex seemed clear enough. You kissed, you fondled, you became excited and you joined bodies until there was a climax. It all seemed straightforward, it happened just like in the book, or the film, yet death came again. Continually I was exploded into fragments. I wept. Perhaps there was something I didn’t understand, or something hidden I hadn’t seen.

Isn’t that a part of the stealing? What has been taken is hidden. How it was taken is invisible, lost in the mists. Who took it a fleeting shadow, a sniggering face running dark alleys in dreams. Yet the invisible, the hidden, the dark alleys of dreams, were all described to me as lunacy, the abnormality of those who want an opium to smooth away the reality of life. God is an ancient valium tablet. Dreams are phantasms of disordered mind and the excreta of the brain. Introversion a form of self loving narcissism. Seeking the hidden produces the same facial expression on a beholder as if one had poked ones finger up ones rectum and then pulled it out to examine it.

Finding the unknown lost; looking at what is hidden; finding understanding for what one wishes to avoid knowledge of. Senseless. Meaningless. So a journey to nonsense – an ache for something one has no ambition to acquire.

It was my children who so deftly touched the empty spaces in my life. There they touched, there and there, like knives blading me. Yet their touch was gentle and their faces with no malice. They were asking me for something I didn’t own to give. Were the stabs of anguish the ache of realising I had been robbed? Partly. They were also the hurts from being called. “Daddy! Daddy!” the calls went. “Daddy I want….!” I couldn’t catch the last words. Somewhere I struggled. A me that had lain long bound and restless heard them call and fought to respond. The knots tying me bit back fiercely. The gag twisted my mouth, confused the words I was trying to form. Not just words in my throat, but things which wanted to be spoken by an older me alive in my organs. A me I did not yet know. “I am alive. I am alive. I am life. I am alive. I hear you,” that bound me was trying to say. Who was it? who was I, that something else living in my body, writhing in my innards, was trying to talk?

But I had not at that time understood how deep calls to deep, and who my children were, and that the voice they called me with spoke elsewhere.

I met a friend, Susan. I thought her beautiful. Seeing her each week during the mid day break our walks and talks led me to intense disquiet. With Susan I was calm, but almost from the moment of parting I knew there was something we had not talked of, something we had not done – there was something. I didn’t know what the something was. It was still a part of the stolen, a feature of my disinheritance. I knew that she called me because I could not be free of her, but must see her again and once more, without satisfaction. As with my children, some of what she called I could not quite catch. She was saying, “Dare to …. me. Dare to …. me. Please …. me!”

In the eyes of the bound me tears formed. There was torment, and awful effort. He could hear what Susan was saying. He was trying to answer, to touch and assure her, but was trapped and interned in my body. Maybe I hadn’t been robbed. Perhaps my assets had been bricked up. Had I chained them with my purity, jailed them with being so bloody GOOD? Being married I never held Susan. I never kissed the lips which were so full. As I said, I was SO polite. And inside there was something writhing.

On the underground riding to work one day, a day I was to see Susan, one of the ropes sundered on the writhing form inside me. He burst out into my body so roughly my chest was suddenly in pain. To breathe was difficult. I was frightened.

When I waited for Susan that day the fight within raged so near the surface I could witness its revolt underneath my skin. There was pain driving through from front to back of my chest as a spear thrust might have done entering from the rear. My heart frenzied enough to see its surging through my clothes. We walked from The Haymarket where she worked, to St. James’s Park, where we fed the ducks. It was sunny and people were lying on the grass dozing in their lunchbreak. Inside me blood was trickling out of hurts. Something was writhing. It yearned to speak. I threw breadcrumbs to the ducks and spoke quiet entertaining things to Susan. When Susan returned to work the thing inside me threw itself against the walls of my chest again. It had not said goodbye to her. It hadn’t even said hallo! I was roaming around with something piercing my chest and only one person had noticed. A woman had stopped me as I was passing the National Portrait Gallery near Trafalgar Square and asked me what was wrong with me. I told her it was my normal appearance. Was there any other way to appear?

{short description of image}

My doctor found no wound, no internal pounding. There appeared to him no fountainhead for the pain gnawing at my breasts. He told me I was perfectly healthy. “Maybe you have been working too hard” he said. He offered me a piece of paper with orders for pills on it. If he had failed to palpate whatever was piercing my back, how could he know what pill would fumigate it? I carried the paper around in a limp hand for a few days. Perhaps I dropped it somewhere. I cannot remember. I know I sat a lot of evenings at home, bent, holding my chest to comfort it. The secret was still locked in my chest.

It was thereabouts I found myself at a wedding. The bride was dark haired, rounded, intelligent, with her natural feelings intact. Her name was June. How I had got involved I do not know. It had the feeling of rightness for the bizarre found in dreams. June took my arm and we went into The Friends Meeting House in Euston Road where the wedding was to take place. Apparently I had known June for a long time, wanted her for just such a duration. I could feel my belly stirring and hungering for her as I looked into her face. I wanted to touch and feast on the pleasure of the soft places of her body. More than anything I wanted to make the hopes she had become real by living them with her.

We got to the door leading to the quiet room in the Meeting House and June produced a ticket to get in. I had half a ticket but it was not good enough. June went in and I stood dazed. It didn’t seem right that a piece of paper was required to be wed. Did this matter more than what we felt for each other? With the right piece of paper could I have wed June, diminished of my longing for her, barren of the connection I felt with her needs and the woman she was?

Wondering how to get the missing half of the ticket I wandered out of the building and into the Euston Road. A battle was taking place. The sort one often gets on warm afternoons when people haven’t got enough to occupy them and tension grows. I had grown up around the corner from the age of nine so I had seen it before. Frustrated men with hands in pockets firing off rounds of lascivious anger at passing women in short skirts. One could hear the ricochets zipping off corseted arses making a whining drawn out “Fuck you! Fuck you!” sound. The battle I stumbled into was between the Should’s and the Should Not’s – the Have’s and the Have not’s. The Should’s were brazenly putting hands on their genital guitars and playing a cord or two. The Should Not’s meanwhile were restricting any genital music, and attacking the Should’s with heavy rifle fire. They in turn were firing back.

I immediately fell onto the road trying to look very dead and hoping, as the bullets wailed over me, that I looked convincing. I had signed the Peace Pledge years ago. I wouldn’t hurt anybody. Why would anyone attempt to hurt me?

My head was sideways on the road and I saw a tall man in army uniform walking toward me. It was difficult for me to believe what I was seeing. The bullets were still being fired, but he was moving along the road without even crouching. He didn’t even look mad. He appeared to be without fear of the battle. I had never watched a man like this before.

When he reached me I recognised how big he was. There was no massive chest or weight. He simply stood straight and was built like a man who used his body. Despite my pose of death he came to me and knelt next to me on the road, putting a hand on my back. I felt his fingers pushing into my flesh. Then he pulled hard at something, putting his other hand on my shoulder for leverage, and tore a big shelled creature off my back. He held it so I could see it, and the remains of tentacles dangling from it which obviously had pierced my chest from the rear. “The rest of those are still inside you,” he said. He actually smiled. The bullets were still seeking bodies. There was no sign of concern for them on his face. “Rub peanut butter on your back daily,” he went on, “and that will clear them out.” Then he stood and walked off carrying the shell. It was about a foot across. Like a large low-profile limpet.

I was scared. Things are out of control when, already married with three kids you can’t marry again because you haven’t got the ticket. They are definitely threatening when a tall wonderful man walks fearless through a battleground that has already terrified you, and pulls a limpet shell from your back which your own doctor said didn’t exist. When the things which are usually kept neatly in your mind become real and experienced, then we are taught to feel afflicted. Whatever door had opened I must shut it. The battle in the Euston Road was stuff for heroes, not for me. It had escaped out of me, and it must be kept incarcerated.

Ground Zero – The Psuedopod

This is ground zero.
I am a reporter on the scene.
It’s rough going at the moment.
Mainly because I arrived two months early.
Because of that my equipment isn’t what it should be.
I have never been in this sort of air before.
It’s difficult to handle without the proper gear.
Digestion is hard too.
A different type of food.
Difficult on the guts.

Those are just a couple of the problems
Arising from being born eight weeks too early.
Anyway, being born is a shit thing to happen to one so young.

Without the fully commissioned environmental tools,
I feel as vulnerable as hell.
I’m scared.
So I’m looking around trying to grasp what is going on.
Okay, here I am at ground zero,
And suddenly — clunk – I am already being locked into
a metal frame of limitation and misery.
Everything starts clicking into place.
Maybe that’s what Christianity means by original sin?

I don’t know about that.
But I do know very clearly
What it is to be born into a situation,
And for it to click into place.
Having a body that is already ailing or,
Not functioning as well as it might.
Here we go, incarnating into this situation,
Click, click, click.
The door bangs closed, and our life begins!

Well, we can say,
“I was wounded when I was born –
When I was one, or two, or three, or six, or eight –
Whenever.”
But some of our wounds occurred
Longer ago than that.
Much further back.
We are actually born into a situation.
Even at birth some of those wounds are already formed.

Imagine it. Here we are.
We opened our eyes as the baby,
And our being is filled with a question,
“What is this?!”
Well, this is life.

Yes, this is ground zero,
And as far as you can tell
No guns have been fired yet,
The bomb hasn’t exploded,
But you are already wounded!
Sometimes it’s a gaping wound.

So –
What are you going to do?
That’s what matters — what are you going to do?
Well, I am a reporter on the scene.
I haven’t long been born,
And I am trying to understand
What the hell is going on around me.

Hold on though,
I think I am just beginning to
Get the hang of some of the
Sound signals that I hear.
I think that’s what they are,
What is taking place.

Apparently these signals are meaningful.
Umm — yes?
I am beginning to get it –
They are some sort of communication.
Aha — I always thought
Communication was happening through
The feelings and the body.
You know, am I held? Am I acceptable? Do I smell?
Am I being pushed away?
But apparently not.
These sounds mean something.
From what I am just beginning to understand,
These communications can be something like,
‘I love you, but I am pushing you away’.
But the, ‘I am pushing you away’ is a subtext.

I am trying to understand all this,
but it is difficult.
But umm — wow! Jesus wept!
All hell has broken loose. I am three now,
It is 1940, and as I look around I see that
Apparently everybody is trying to kill each other.
This is a hell of a thing,
Because I’m like one big question mark.
Everything I am is wondering what to do.
I’m looking around to see what resources I’ve got.
Umm – not much –
Fuck me, I think I’ll hide.

Okay, to bring you up-to-date,
I’ve gone into hiding,
But that doesn’t seem to be working too well.
I’m still in the middle of all this stuff –
This war shit — and I’m being victimised.
This is happening, even though I’m trying to say to everybody,
‘Look, I’m not really here!
Okay? Just get away, I’m not really here!
So, stop all the shit.
Just get on with your fucking lives,
And leave me alone.

What do you have to do to get the message over?
Die?’
That’s an idea. Maybe I can try dying.

I tried, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
I want to die.
I want it as bad as I can,
But I still seem to be breathing.
When they see me breathing
They think I’m still alive.
I guess the only way is to top myself.
But I don’t really want to go that far.

Shit! So what else is open to me?
Wow! I never thought of that.
I can create an imaginary world!
Umm — okay. Okay!
Well, stuff it.
What with all the shit
Going on out there,
They can stuff their world.
I’ve got a place here
That is fucking wonderful,
Right inside me..
I love it.
Well — God loves me.

This is bloody good.
I can carry on growing here!

Hold on. What is that I can hear?
It sounds like guns going off!
Well, maybe it is,
But that is ‘out there’
And it’s okay in this place I’ve created.
So I don’t need to think about that too much.

So, right!
I’m in a place where I can take stock now.
My mother is working all the time.
I don’t see much of her.
I’ve got time now to wonder
What happened to me?
How did I get here?
What is this place?
Well, at least I have time to recoup.
But how the hell did I get here?

So anyway, here I am,
The vulnerable, sensitive baby.
And there, in the ‘world’ – WAR.
My mother is at work.
I am alone a lot of the time.
What can I do to deal
With all this –
All my feelings?

Well, I am hiding in myself.
But people keep expecting me to
Respond in some way.
All I want is to be
“In there” back in the egg,
In the womb,
Anywhere away from the struggle to survive.
And all hell was breaking loose in the world – war.
So what should a small,
Vulnerable and helpless child do?

Well, I learned a really neat trick.
Remember, I am still a tiny life form
Curled up back in the egg
Waiting to be born.
At least, that’s where I am in my feelings.
I need a bit longer before I can emerge.
I need a bit more love and care
Wrapped in somebody’s arms.
Just a bit longer.
I need a bit longer
Before I can dare to come out.
And where are you going to find that
In a world torn apart by war?
Competition and violence
Seem to be the name of the game.
Well, the really neat trick is that
I discovered how to
Put out a malleable psuedopod!!

Remember –
It had to appear that I was
‘Out there’ doing something in the world.
So I put out my psuedopod
That could take any shape I liked.
I made it appear to be
The growing figure of a young male,
And later a man.

I learned certain skills of speech,
Of behaviour,
Of apparently responding
Intelligently to other people.
But it was all just an act.
It wasn’t me.
I am still curled up in the
Corner somewhere trying to survive,
Trying to keep people off me,
To remain invisible.
I am still waiting to be born.

So in doing this trick,
Putting out a psuedopod,
I became this great ventriloquist.
But somehow I became confused
And got mix-up in the roles.
I began to think the
Psuedopod was really me.

It’s a common mistake.
Most other people around me
Are actually psuedopods,
Ventriloquist’s dummies, a zombie.

Crazy as it may seem,
We start to think the
Artificial self we have created
To cope with the world is actually us.
What a terrible tragedy that is.
We start to feel lost and uncertain –
You know –
Oh my God, who am I?
What is my life worth?
Why do I feel so rootless and depressed?

Well, that is me.
Lost.
Depressed.
Not with any real life
Or connections with other people.

So here we are living as,
And identifying with, the psuedopod,
And all sorts of difficult questions arise
That have no way of being answered.
We ask ourselves what is my intrinsic value?
Why do I lack any real sense of purpose?
How is it I don’t really know why I’m here?

These uncertainties lead to attempting
Some sort of measurement
In order to find out who we are.
You know –
What is my rate of sexual success?
How much money have I got in the bank?
But all the time
You are dealing with a false person.

Of course,
Eventually it is all going to fall apart.
But we try to maintain the validity
Of that false self
With all sorts of methods,
Everything from alcohol,
Antidepressants,
Hard drugs – to calming meditation.

Our medical fraternity is
Overwhelmed by people
Whose lives are falling apart –
Perhaps even their bodies.
In fact they are being asked
To patch up something that really
Does need to come apart at the seams.
What we actually need is some sort of
Wise support as we gradually
Dismantle this psuedopod,
This false self.

Laing had the right idea.
He suggested that we need to help people,
To give them an environment
In which they could fall apart.

Meanwhile, behind the facade,
Here am I – the ventriloquist,
The fragile sensitive baby
Who is actually connected
With the rest of the world,
Looking around,
Absolutely moved
By what I see in the world.
Astounded, by all these people
Who are making out they know who they are.

Strangely, these psuedopods
Get into offices of power.
They direct human affairs.
Some of them are apparently
In charge of the whole nation,
And they don’t even know who they are.

But obviously, they are doing a great job,
Because they have been given all the cues.
They have been reared in that way,
Programmed to be a sort of automaton,
And not to get upset
By not knowing the hell who they are.
They manage to live without real perception.
They live without being able to see,
As the baby does,
Its part in all creation,
Connected with all of human past.

One of the easiest ways
To find out who is a psuedopod
And who is a real person
Involves a simple memory test.
Ask the person if they
Can remember their childhood.
If they say, “Oh yes, I remember
My aunt Nellie telling me how I
Used to wet the bed.
I remember that.”
Well that is not real memory.
It is more like having photographs
That you are acquainted with.

Ask them if they remember being a baby.
Ask if they remember being in the womb.
Ask them if they remember their life in eternity.
The real self remembers all this.
After all it emerged from eternity,
Lived in the womb,
And experienced all those years until the present.

If you are suffering amnesia,
You are probably a psuedopod.

As for me, I was desperate to find my way back.
I saw the signs of my maladjustment
Everywhere I looked.
It was difficult to accept those signs.
Painful!
They were like being stabbed
With a hot knife.
They were in places
You don’t want to be dug.
They hurt too much – old wounds.
That is my story.

This is ground zero.
I am a reporter on the scene.
It’s rough going at the moment.
Maybe we are both pseudopods,
But I hold out my hand to you.

Golden Guns

I was born just prior to the second world war. I lived through the war years in the UK, and Golden Guns expresses the paradox of a good childhood amidst war.

Growing years in which war was everyday.
Guns pounding in the night,
Reaching for shadows,
Amidst the search-lit
Dappled sky.
Roaring guns singing
Me a lullaby
Of another ordinary day,
Reassuring by what was
Normal in my world.

Tank traps,
Barbed wire barricades,
Rifle shells,
Tin foil from the sky,
And those glorious summers
In Rabbit and stoat
Filled harvesting.
Running behind
horse drawn carts
Full of wheat sheaves
With the street boys.

Climbing up the back rope
To ride on the top.
Looking down on
Old men behind
The horse.

These are my memories
Of good years.
And in those memories
Are the guns –
Those golden,
Golden guns.

Forty Years

Thats how long it took
To get so ingrained.
Forty years!
Well if you are twenty,
Thats twice your age.
If you are forty
It is your whole lifetime.
Even if you are fifty or sixty,
It is still most of your life.

So its been difficult
For me to lose
What took me so long
To gain.
Because I cant go home anymore
Not like I used to.
Home was where my kids were,
All five of them.

Wherever I had been
There was always
One of more of them there
Pleased to see me.
Home meant doing things together.
Every night we read a story.
We learned to cook there,
To talk long talks,
Tease the dog,
Make a bow and
Shoot the arrows.

At home we laughed,
Swapped favourite music,
Held whoever was the baby,
Wrestled, went for walks.
We swam out to sea
With me as a tug
Pulling the others
With the dog swimming alongside.

We never had babysitters.
It was too much fun
To be with my friends
Because my kids were my friends.
And if I was away I would
Hurry home again.
So I never went out
To a bar to be diverted.
There was too much
Going on at home.

We built a boat there,
Learned to fish from it.
We watched the baby
Fall asleep with its mouth open,
Found out how
To shoot an air rifle,
Build a fire balloon
At home.

No wonder I always want to
Hurry home.
Except I keep forgetting,
My house is empty now.
I live here by myself,
And I never got the habit
Of looking elsewhere
For that warmth.
So its always a terrible shock
Just how empty this house is
Without them.

It took forty years
The old habit dies hard.

Next >

< Previous

Tony Crisp

Posts Tagged ‘My Journey’