There’s no moving on from Buddhism, just bouncing around to return as a sound you heard once before and once before that and probably once before that, but you can’t tell anymore. The latest little echo came via Carlo Rovelli, via Emmanuel Ravelli, via Maurice Ravel’s dad swimming in circles going nowhere fast around the vortex of death. Who knew who flew blue into new moon news? Not the Bolero man, not the half-wit assistant, but the witness to timelessness in acid Alice, riding the radio waves into a surfeit of surfaces, signalling emptinesses and then the intricacies of thermals and spinfoams, but you can’t ride those my friend—in the end you just bend your knees and ease into the world and then the next world. No severing the perseveration ever freezing the emergent person—just gotta be who ya gotta be and grasp all ya need without too tight a grip on the drip drip of relational bits dropping the drop of the shot tower into the pit of perfect particles making wonder waves, wonder waves making perfect particles. Knitting strings into things isn’t so fanciful now is it? You got the macramé hammock full of dreams—trauma of träumerei for the lazy bastard basting a lizard brain—and the cosy crochet bobble hat—a bubble full of certainty to rub-a-dub-dub with the finitudes of socio-foam. Foams within foams fractally yours fizzing into surfactant exhaustion—stick your fingers in and thrash’em around a bit to get that lather standing again, to lubricate a little more life, to ease the razor blade through the stubble, to resist descent into scum—the Dharma bums’ mission.
But fuck transitions, abrupt is the way of the it-all—corruptions, interruptions, ruptures, eruptions—all the volcanic magic of geographic tragedy written up in the kind of comedic monologue Plato—no friend to the poet—would have hated.
Homage to John Russell on the 2nd anniversary of his death.
The video can be taken as an allusive piece on the role of thresholds as goals, liminal spaces, constrictions, suspension points and transitions. The guitar work is what it is; [click here to view]
Now that we know there is no passive matter, no universal stability, and that the moment is an unfathomable origin about which being turns, nothing more can be said. Contra Wittgenstein: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must … make it sound, bring into being unenclosed, strictly unencumbered by the conceptual apparatus though it may always remain exposed to it and therefore vulnerable to disciplinary degradation.
This free possibility is the purpose of art—music being the least and poetry the most problematic in this regard—the point being that the conceptual substance of language is central in the closure and expansion of spatio-temporal realities and their periodic stabilization in the worlds we inhabit. What cannot be spoken of is ‘the real;’ it is beyond conceptualization, is beyond containment, but it can be and must be alluded to in reality.
Russell Genius – 2020, acrylic on canvas, 762 x 508 mm
You can find several recent guitar improvisations on my YouTube channel. This one, ‘Abridged’ [click here], inspired a specific bit of video making. I know that of a morning sunlight is reflected off the surface of the Brayford Pool onto the underside of the Brayford Bridge. The visual mood of this is what I thought would complement the guitar work to which I had added a touch of compression, some large-room reverb, and some dripping water effects. On the day the underside of the bridge was less interestingly lit than the wall below it, so, my focus shifted a little and unexpectedly my camera captured something with ancient philosophical resonance—echoes of Plato’s cave (Republic, 514a–520a).
My take on the allegory is twisted. We think we know what is real, but we don’t, we can’t, no process of being can. What the feeble being of humans admits into reality is what is necessary for their survival and, thanks to the technological ingenuity of the species, a tiny but very dangerous surplus, which isn’t. It is a surplus fuelled by the hubris of anthropocentric, scientistic, and theomorphic delusions and leads some to believe, as Plato did, that with the right discipline one can escape from and return to the cave. But there is no escaping the cave; the cave is the safe container for the little light that enters from beyond and illuminates its walls usefully and meaningfully through being, the reality making operation of the greater sensorium, which is like a filtering lens.
Everything we know is abridged, and abridged to a very positive end by our being: it makes the realities we need for life to sustain and renew itself. The things of existence are precipitated by being. Beyond the cave we do not exist; nothing, no-thing does. All we can do is work with the realities we make, sort their necessary illusions from their deadly delusions, and act for our own good. The real remains beyond the cave, a unified unknown and unknowable, and it is just as well that it does.
The music ends with spoken words taken from Nois[e] iv /No itat⁁ic ⁁l. The messiness of that title derives from the butchering of a semordnilap. It is the fourth section of Viridian Meridian a long poem I dedicated to John Russell (1954-2021) and is published in: Matthews, Geoffrey Mark. Hymn to the Prisoners of the Wasteland (Lincoln: Perennisperegrinator, 2021), pp. 23-36. [Click to see on Amazon]
in once placid north the prudent
water of being crosses nature
with will which centred
would all energy wound
For a month I had a right royal battle with this poem Do continuit(y) … belie aortic jets. I think it managed to achieve a note of ‘delirious pragmatism’ that makes me feel it won out over my discomfort at some of its more delicious and sonorous ambiguities … a proper poem then. Think of it as sheet music; you should sound it out with the mouth and vocal chords, which is maybe too obvious an instruction to need giving, but I give it because all other sounding possibilities are perfectly legitimate; for example, I would also like to hear it sounded out by radically free fingers on a piano, perhaps simultaneously with the voice.
M sent me a poem recently and introduced it by saying “Starting to feel the nostalgia strong these days” … the poem disturbed me in a rather useful way. It burrowed into my brain and made me think hard about where the motivation to continue producing work comes from, how its complexion changes and what the consequences of inconsistent motivations are.
Permovetur ac praegrauata (2022) collage and acrylic on canvasboard, 127 x 178mm
My first response was: “Bloody hell M, you still know how to hit the hard notes … / The emotional rollercoaster continues … I cry more than ever … grind my teeth (the few that are left) … and make stuff (compulsively, as ever) … maybe some of that comes across in the poem attached, an anxious response … am I too comfortable where I am?”
Calypso’s Cave
Diagnosis: we’ve lost that ancient ease with nomadic existence
Homosaps ... we were never meant to have such long lives
Laying down the hat cannot satisfy as it once did (when we were lucky)
Now only the impossible return haunts unspeakable dreams
Homer on homing ... carrying shrapnel in heart and brain
Stuck on an island a lightyear from the womb
What was it really like? ... the mitochondria start to lie
Won’t accept it ... can’t accept it ... of course not
The horizon is made of the notes we sing
We may not be travelling much any more
But it still moves if we keep singing
That was not enough. Something continued to eat away inside me and, without any decision to make it do so, it infected another poem, one that I had been working on for a while:
Idol says name a theme [1]
For Michael Blackburn
Seriously
the burning highlight
time and again
makes knowledge return cold
although the rampant habit of
kind inattention
stares instant scorn without farewell Fridays
Like listening to
matriarchal imaginings
does the draped puzzle
keep insecurity away?
Maybe a disgusted look
becomes a matter
of levelling still reticent masters you admire
like stretching the naked balance
of certain forgotten sounds
on marvellously exclaimed
monochromatic terms
on the sober conviction of
spoiled dialogue
high tension blood and more
Another Beckett character
feels staggered at the imbecilic stuff
darting its way through
the internally true in body space
struggling alone
to speak into canvas
with a viewer’s reasoning which features
dual expectations and because
someone reports their sensitivities
in rational work
turns pictures or issues
into classical ruins that nothing grips
Vivid insults clear
secretly saturated colour anyway
imagined to nothing between
absence and growled loads
to nothing between
past cruelty and imaginary control
cut later kid
for uncanny image work
exclaimed in mysterious delights
Preoccupied in trying alcohols
most with a
delicious disheartening counter
the poet vanishes
playing gravely
in push-staged clarity
equal to the risk
that continues about the earth
Its mass has my old
painter muscle know
the colours of
foreground motifs
the remarkable polychrome things
that better sound out distances
eliminate contours and mean
complete panic of a hybrid sort
a long morning version
grabbed in fluctuations of will
but sure of the point
in caressing another effort or two
We are in different territory at this point. This is where a speculative ontological endeavour has led me as a poet: into the threshold between perception and delirium. It is where I suspect realities are made and continually renewed, a place where the difference between sense-making and reality-making becomes questionable. I am not philosopher enough to reason this out in the abstract, but I hope I am artist enough, poet enough, to explore its contours and act as witness to its moment and gravity. There is “no nostalgia in this, but definitely an affirmation of creative struggle.”
This still niggles though and sure enough a third episode has emerged. This one is less anxious, less desperate, more of a turn, a play, and it does witness the correlation of sense and reality. Yes, retrospection haunts my thoughts, but for now at least I still stumble backwards into the future.
Things kill man … uh, date of agony? [2]
In those exceedingly brittle years
thinking upholds the third effect of life
working aristocratic
and fluently expressed dispositions
for that
small kick of grubby motive control
and not for measuring
ripeness of profit paid in paper pansies
The majority … dream that dream nation
perhaps clearer
than land-owning and politic men
whose catholic success of crumbs
favours the accidental hand
while the success of defects therein
dominates the present
In idler periods
or little turns of years
for creative people
there is nothing like
ordering remedies
which quietly embrace errors
or absurdly
pursuing problem pictures
by the system-fulfilling
execution of weighty art
In the settled autonomy
that helps ruin
many lost in service
freedom talks more
in boring repose
not in chasing
better thoughts about the place
For it is said in top dollar books
that Florence’s past perturbations
invested a
lively fitter little thinking
rarely caught satisfying and next so old
Middle life is past. It is recalled in a mess of emotions that congeals into ‘dross’ (an amalgam of loss and dread). What is left but to sail for home? … Well, there is another option, whether by will or by compulsion, to ride a rocket into the cosmos, to be tossed about by many sources of gravity rather than be overwhelmed by one. Beyond the earth or under it … I don’t know how this will end. Maybe the alchemists were on to something after all and there will be gold.
[1] Sources: Delaney, Sam. Sam Delaney is at home, The Big Issue, No. 1511, 2 May 2022, p. 37; Balzac, Honoré. The Unknown Masterpiece, trans. Richard Howard (2001, New York: New York Review Books), pp. 42-4; and. Turps Banana in conversation with Nicholas Pace, Turps Painting Magazine, No. 25, pp. 79-80.
[2] Sources: Hodgkinson, Tom. Thinking Small, RSA Journal, issue 2, 2014, p. 50; and Bacon, Francis. XLII: Of Youth and Age, in Bacon’s Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients (Kindle Location 2845-2872).
Phlegmatic thinking
just outlasts the simple age
sustained in important war papers
in a frenzy of great ideas
in your head
Superior housing sense
places the North
on time-keeping drugs
engulfing the mythical Jesus
Sharp talking
is in fact antiquated
and my message
mends this severe kingdom
while a lunatic writes
of the previous end point
giving out to
intermittently still deeply
underground nastiness
to which
other gradually pissed protesters
always return
Outsiders’ big faces
push at central traps
knowing
the gleefully tanned old twats
throw anything wrong
at queues
without becoming
slightly strange through impenetrable help
before quieter things
occasion our now plastic sphere
stream clearly to centre being
turning reasonable minutes here
here but in really warm air
traditionally brought in
to keep out
the bar to inefficient becoming
and starting
the other surprise
clunking anywhere the dogs exit
without the opportunities
in sorts of passion
and in matter’s signs
to take the top targets
well this night
and make history
For years people think of nostalgia
as featuring
everything once sharp and strong
but to anyone honourable
it comes as new things killed
as bodies pitched today
to some joke station
And I am wondering here whether there is another approach to what is perhaps ‘our’ oldest aesthetic question, that of ‘land and identity’, specifically one which reacts more directly to the English Romantic Moderns I read about in Alexandra Harris’s eponymous book,[ii] one which musters a stronger cynicism in material forms, especially those processed through the digital and subsequently embodied as ‘permanent pollution’ to become prospective archaeological treasures. I like the hint in that last point that the art, should it be ‘collectable’ at all, should be seen as enigmatically timeless enough for the more eclectic of museum collections and seen as beyond any fashionable notion of ‘contemporary’—i.e. institutionalized, politicized, socially engaged—artistic practice and therefore not really what the publicly funded ‘curated’ art scene and the associated contemporary art market is looking for. Having said that, I realize that the art market and the cultural machinery it depends upon will, in the end, deal in anything that can enhance reputations and turn a profit. So, we’re stuffed really.
[i] Sources: Barradale, Greg. My pitch: Hugh Palmer, The Big Issue, No. 1511, 2 May 2022, p. 46; and Osborne, Richard. Up the British (2009, London: Zidane Press), pp. 132-4. Title anagram: St Paul’s Station.
Art built a rage, man. See: agony … is the serene seminar [1]
There is a hint in this of some of the effects and affectations of an autism. I would never have found a form of words as effective as this one by using a more traditional method of composition, one involving internal dialogue and “allegiance to the dead”. Two things strike me about this: 1) that by scattering attention to a de-familiarized text both traits are deferred while the bulk of a poem is generated; and 2) the ‘finishing’ that follows is consequently more effective at digging deep within (oneself and one’s reality). As an initial form-finding technique ‘reverse decimation’ is radically disinhibiting whereas, even in their more imaginative lines of flight, those ‘dialogues’ upon which the reasoning faculties rely are quite the opposite.
Sources: Gombos, Paula. My Pitch: Gabriel Tataru, The Big Issue, No. 1491, 6 December 2021, p. 54; Civale, Susan. Home free, review of Anyone’s game by Lesley Chamberlain, The Times Literary Supplement, No. 5732, 8 February 2013, p. 20; and Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie (2016, London: Repeater Books), pp. 127-8.
Apparently this was broadcast across the galaxy on a gravitational carrier wave today:
Message from Planet Earth to all my biosphere-bearing neighbours.
I am presently suffering from a viral infection. I expect to recover fairly soon one way or another. The virus, however, may not be defeated by my fever. In fact my elevated temperature and erratic behaviour seem to have created the ideal conditions for the virus to mutate. A recent variant has proven capable of spreading through interplanetary space. I fear it is only a matter of time before the whole solar system becomes infected and the virus becomes a threat to the rest of the galaxy.
Please do not think me guilty of evolutionary incompetence. This could happen to any habitable planet. I am ill. My illness is the consequence of an addiction. I am an addict. I became addicted to biosphere-enhancement maybe 252 million of my years ago. I know it seems foolish to put such a high value on purely cosmetic effects, but once you start it is very difficult to stop. Several times I have had the most beautiful skin you can imagine, made up of millions of species of colourful, vibrant, life forms. And each time I thought, I can do better. I can do more. But this time it feels different; it feels wrong: I may have created a biosphere-destroying virus against which there is no defence.
Please take this warning seriously: “Fostering intelligent life is risky. The human H.s.s. variant is now spaceborne. Mask your biosphere and keep your distance from Earth.”
The Roman openings [1]
prose then moaning
poem nears nothing
poor meanings then
open naming others
Whatever movement the source stores
one guiding system unites the circle with
organ-less orientation—as from a pipe
roaring from culture’s familiar thought
whose possibilities majesty suggested
The conservation base of nearby formulas
handles something utopians break every day
narrow forms crossing well on the shoulder
for planet-quake relationships furthest down
inside civic Gaul are themselves art
If I knew what I meant I might be ill-advised to say so. After all, where is the sense in making too much sense? That does nothing but shut out the thinker, not least the thinker in myself. I am talking about writing here. Or maybe I should say I am writing about talking.
The other day a current affairs interviewer on BBC Radio 4 told the interviewee to stop talking … he told the Prime Minister to STOP TALKING! A day or so later, in a completely different context, I came across the word ‘garrulous’ and immediately thought ‘if I used that word no-one would know what I meant.’ I had to consult a dictionary to discover it is a word I would never use correctly. So, it is OK to make a certain amount of sense, just enough to establish that what the reader is reading is readable, but any more than that? I have my doubts.
Talking Heads Stop Making Sense. That could be the name of a rock band and the title of a film of their concert performances. It could be a general statement concerning the pointlessness of uninterrupted speech, as in the case of the out-of-control Prime Minister. But I think of it as a cautionary aphorism.
And if I didn’t know what I meant? Well, to quote English Bob [2]: “… if you were to point a pistol at a king or a queen your hands would shake as though palsied. … Now, a president? I mean, why not shoot a president?” [or a prime minister for that matter … or me?]
[1] Sources: Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures (1973, New York: Basic Books), pp. 452-3; Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1991, Oxford: Basil Blackwell), pp. 422-3; and Jones, Michael J. Roman Lincoln: Conquest, Colony & Capital (2002, Stroud: Tempus Publishing), p. 152.
[2] A garrulous gun-slinging character played by Richard Harris in the film Unforgiven (1992, dir. Clint Eastwood, screen play David Webb Peoples.)
I am still wrestling with Kerouac, and some may like this bout.
The Lean 2015
Whether by movement and life or walking on delight, this unconscious commercial phenomenon travels. For material keys warn of material differences—sanity by all yellow scars that stars chance, including the political costs of horizontal marks above the thicker forms of our turning covers. Would the constellations, regarded for flames, risk burning irrefutable bells of general incision-shaped rushing—something certain returning dolphins fissure each greenish-grey afternoon they fight where voices be personal mince?
The latent tower is disclosing whole gleaming angles in an independent nothing striped to crack coins—tools part-split and lounged-back overall to build the group between Hornbeam and Juniper. Albeit with ancient fumes to create demands, the spectatorial spirit may form these smooth spires, clearly calling the landscapes that make past spaces right: “the anatomy of twisted sects and the scandal of red species.”
The isms thus needed to spread over surface-thin desert calls are tactics that real freedom theories approach noisily from small spindles to woolly joints on one plane; they would pressure advanced corridors, take the elders, and drive in burning alliances and their energy to signify existing yellow and purple rocks shining thereafter for strangers.
I don’t invite Old Angel Midnight. The conversations are over; that’s all I am saying. It’s personal and I can’t help it. The last time I shared living space with anyone I was thirty-two years old (I am now sixty-seven). What do I know about turning about, dancing dicey dances, and singing in organum? I am pain-sensitive to the movement of microbes. How could I even dream of allowing my flayed, still-quick corpse to be brought into contact with someone life-worn and almost certainly calloused, clumsy, and cracked? I am a remote sensor, a secular Watcher, I am here if anyone needs me, but I don’t care if I am not needed, I have vital preoccupations to sustain me, I make art.
Sources: Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000, New York: Viking), pp. 290-91; Bookchin, Murray. The Modern Crisis (1986, Philadelphia PA: New Society Publishers), pp. 160-61; Cole, Rex Vicat. The Artistic Anatomy of Trees (1941, London: Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd.), p. 318; and Greenpeace, COP26: our last good chance to avoid climate breakdown, pamphlet, September 2021.
PERENNISPEREGRINATOR 