BLONDIN by Universal Octopus

BLONDIN Collected Poems

Brian Taylor

UNIVERSAL OCTOPUS

Every man is Blondin Every lifetime a rope, finer than a spider's thread, sharper than a needle, stretched between birth and death (breath and breath) across Niagara.

First Edition published 2006 Published by Universal Octopus 2019 www.universaloctopus.com COPYRIGHT ÂŠ 2006 Brian F Taylor

ISBN 978-1-9999063-7-5 Third Edition 2019 A catalogue record of this book is available from the British library.

The Sun shines in a bucket of water and doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get wet.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS Blindness Kindness Going Out There is No Other Coming Back There is No Trace Bamboo Leaves Oxford Blues Vienna Gnomonic Verses Worm’s Eye View Vajras & Dorjes Centre The Universal Octopus & Mr Tao Previous Lives & Astrals Gnome: Gnome Says Gnome’s Career Opportunities Today For Humanity Memory Has Come to Replace Understanding Basic Buddhism for a World in Trouble Basic Buddhism Series

CONTENTS Introduction........................................................................ i Part One BLINDNESS KINDNESS THE WOMAN AND THE SAINT ...............................................1 FOR MOTHER AND CHILD.....................................................2 THE HAPPIEST OLD ...............................................................3 THE SUDDENLY SEPARATE SPIDER SENTRY ......................4 JOE-CHAIR .............................................................................5 SOMEWHERE ELSE. ..............................................................5 A SHELL .................................................................................6 A TREE CLIMBED OVER THE WALL......................................6 MATTER IS DEAD...................................................................7 WHICH DO YOU DO? .............................................................7 M-M-M-M-MEUM ...................................................................8 YOU WORRY? YOU? ...............................................................8 ON THE BROKEN AND TRANSCENDED ................................9 DEEP DOWN TO DEATH ......................................................10 HIM AND HER AND THEM ...................................................10 PYRAMIDS AND SARCOPHAGI.............................................11 THE FALL..............................................................................11 IN A FLAT ..............................................................................12 SMILE ...................................................................................12 THE HUMBLE WERE GREAT ONCE ....................................13 YOU KNOW ABOUT VIETNAM? ............................................13 GARDEN FENCE REPAIRED ................................................14 BISHOPâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S POEM ...................................................................14 CHRIST SAID ........................................................................15 NO EXIT ................................................................................16 HICKORY DICKORY DOCK...................................................18 A BUNDLE OF FEATHERS ...................................................19 SWEET BAUM ......................................................................19 CUT INTO THE HUMAN WOOD............................................20 A CANDLE AND ITS CONCEPT .............................................20 TO THE BELIEVERS IN OUR GOVERNMENTS ....................21 NOBODY WILL HEAR YOU DEAD ........................................21

WHAT SHALL I DO?..............................................................22 YOU ARE AT PEACE .............................................................23 THE PUNISHMENT FOR LISTENING IS HEARING ............23 GREAT MEN .........................................................................24 NOW .....................................................................................25 LIONS AND LAMBS ..............................................................25 WHAT’S THAT? .....................................................................26 SPEAKING STATUE ..............................................................26 MY HEAD IS CLEAR TODAY.................................................27 ANCIENT MARINER TO CLERK ............................................27 THE CUSHION......................................................................28 THAT BIRD ...........................................................................28 THE ROAD AND THE HILL ...................................................29 LONG ANTENNAE.................................................................29 US AND THEM......................................................................30 OEDIPUS COLEOPTERA ......................................................30 TOMORROW .........................................................................31 GNOMON ..............................................................................35 MON SEMBLABLE................................................................35 FOUR SEASONS ...................................................................36 WEEKEND PEOPLE..............................................................39 SCIENTIA CAUSARUM SUFFICIENTIUM..............................40 MODERN TIMES...................................................................41 GAUDEAMUS, IGITUR, IUVENES NON SUMUS...................42 HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE ....................................................44 HERE AND NOW ..................................................................44 FROM HAMPTON COURT TO BLOOMSBURY SQUARE ......45 FEMINA DOLOROSA ............................................................46 MIRROR ................................................................................47 SHELL...................................................................................47 TOMORROW AND TOMORROW...........................................48 Part Two GOIING OUT THERE IS NO OTHER TRENINNOW LANE ...............................................................49 ROSETTA STONE .................................................................50 THIS YEAR ............................................................................52 MID-SEPTEMBER SUN ........................................................53 11TH HOUR, 11TH DAY, 11TH MONTH ....................................54 ET EGO IN ARCADIA ............................................................55 PLUS ÇA CHANGE................................................................56 ARMISTICE DAY 1993 ..........................................................57

FURZE AND BRACKEN ........................................................58 VISITORS AND VISITATIONS ................................................59 JUPITER SPINS.....................................................................60 RAINER MARIA RILKE ..........................................................60 REQUIEM: ARMISTICE DAY 1995 ........................................61 TRANSCENDENTAL ROSE ...................................................61 O.U.B.C.................................................................................62 THE SEASON ........................................................................63 COMPASSION .......................................................................63 APRIL ....................................................................................64 JUNE ....................................................................................65 THERE ARE SILENCES ........................................................66 BLACKBIRD ..........................................................................66 CALCULATIONS....................................................................67 MOUNT EDGCUMBE............................................................68 HOLLAND HOUSE - HOLLAND PARK ..................................69 THE 1944 EDUCATION ACT.................................................70 MEA CULPA ..........................................................................70 JANUARY, JANUARY…. ........................................................71 24 MOLESWORTH ROAD .....................................................72 EVERYDAY LIFE (DYING NORMALLY)..................................73 YES .......................................................................................74 SHADOWS ............................................................................75 THE SUN SHINES .................................................................75 GOING OUT THERE IS NO OTHER ......................................76 SPRING .................................................................................76 ORPHEUS IN EXTREMIS ......................................................77 MIDWINTER’S DAY IN THE BOTANIC GARDENS ................79 THE FOUNTAIN ....................................................................81 QUIETUS ..............................................................................81 AMERICA, AMERICA ............................................................82 MAGDALEN ..........................................................................83 UP TO DATE AND READY TO GO.........................................84 IN AND OUT THE WINDOWS................................................85 EXAMINATION SCHOOLS ....................................................86 OXFORD: MICHAELMAS ......................................................87 WHY? ....................................................................................88 USE IT, BUT BE RIGHT ........................................................89 PATIENCE .............................................................................90 HAPPINESS...........................................................................91 UNFINISHED ........................................................................92 PURITY..................................................................................93

LISTEN..................................................................................94 BLUEBOTTLE MIND .............................................................96 MINDFULNESS.....................................................................97 YOGA ....................................................................................98 COMPLETING CYCLES.........................................................98 FORK IN THE ROAD .............................................................99 SEEING THE OBVIOUS ......................................................100 LISTENERS .........................................................................101 ON GUARD .........................................................................102 GOOD AND EVIL ................................................................103 SATAN STILL FINDS WORK FOR IDLE HANDS..................104 MAKE AN EFFORT..............................................................105 HERE ..................................................................................106 FREEDOM ..........................................................................107 RETURNING TO THE ROOT ...............................................108 CONTROL ...........................................................................109 DON’T STIR IT UP ...............................................................109 QUO VADIS?.......................................................................110 TREASURE .........................................................................111 NO EXIT ..............................................................................112 STOP! ..................................................................................113 HAVE A HAPPY WEEK........................................................114 Part Three COMING BACK THERE IS NO TRACE CATHAY ..............................................................................117 WAR OR PEACE..................................................................121 TREMATON CASTLE ..........................................................122 PERSEVERANCE ................................................................123 UPEKKHĀ ...........................................................................124 METAMORPHOSIS .............................................................125 MAKING MERIT ..................................................................125 TRUTH IN THE BOTANIC GARDENS..................................126 HE THAT HATH EARS, LET HIM HEAR..............................128 HOW MANY ANGELS ON THE POINT OF A PIN? ...............128 JUDGE NOT, THAT YE BE NOT JUDGED..........................130 TRAVEL LIGHT ...................................................................131 WALK ON ............................................................................132 THE RUDDER.....................................................................134 RIGHT VIEW .......................................................................135 OLD WOUNDS ....................................................................136 NO PROJECT ......................................................................136

PEACE ................................................................................137 METTĀ ................................................................................137 BHAVANĀ ...........................................................................138 MINDFULNESS ...................................................................138 SELF-DISCIPLINE ...............................................................139 PURIFY THE MIND .............................................................140 THE SCIENCE OF ADEQUATE CAUSES ............................141 GET UNSTUCK ...................................................................142 THE PERFECT TEAM NEEDS PERFECT PLAYERS ............143 SILENCE .............................................................................144 SHANGHAI JAR ..................................................................145 HOW OLD ARE YOU? .........................................................145 I, ME, MINE ........................................................................146 BETHANY............................................................................147 SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI ............................................147 EDMUND GOSSE: FATHER AND SON ...............................148 HARROW 1962 – 2002........................................................150 NĀMA AND RŪPA ...............................................................152 THE WORSE, THE BETTER................................................153 THE UNQUIET DEAD .........................................................153 ONE ARROW, TWO ARROWS .............................................154 LOYALTY .............................................................................154 CHRYSALIS.........................................................................155 NEGLECTED GARDENS .....................................................155 WATERING WEEDS............................................................156 NO NEW PROJECTS ...........................................................157 LONG SNAKE, SHORT LADDER.........................................157 VIEWPOINTS.......................................................................158 AN EDUCATED CROCODILE IS STILL A CROCODILE.......159 THE NOTEBOOK AND THE PEN ........................................160 CINDERELLA’S SHOES ......................................................161 WHY DON’T YOU WANT TO KNOW? ..................................162 BUILDING A HOUSE ..........................................................163 STILL LIFE ..........................................................................163 PRETENDERS.....................................................................164 “DEGREES WE KNOW UNKNOWN IN DAYS BEFORE ...... 165 WHISPERS OF MORTALITY ................................................166 KOH SAMET (FOR SUNTHORN PHU) .................................167 MĀRA ..................................................................................168 A POISONED CHALICE.......................................................168 FULL MOON DAY THIRD LUNAR MONTH..........................169 IN MEMORIAM VLADIMIR ILYCH .......................................173

CHANDRA...........................................................................173 REQUIEM FOR A PRINCESS ..............................................174 YAMA’S RETINUE ...............................................................175 HERAKLEITOS I..................................................................177 HERAKLEITOS II ................................................................178 ASHMOLEAN: ΤΕΧΝΗ ΜΊΜΕΤΊΚΗ ....................................179 TAIL OF A TYPHOON ..........................................................179 GUIDE BOOK .....................................................................180 CITY OF ANGELS................................................................181 HOMO SAPIENS CHRISTMAS 2004 ...................................182 SIC TRANSEUNT TEMPORA ...............................................183 BANDS ................................................................................184 CORPSE IN MY ROOM .......................................................185 JANUARY 23 2005 ..............................................................186 “UNDER THE DARK OF THE VINE VERANDA” ..................188 FEBRUARY 23 MERCURII DIES .........................................189 NEIGHBOURS AT BREAKFAST ..........................................190 “GENTLE SPRING” IN THE ASHMOLEAN...........................191 DIAMOND MOUNTAIN........................................................192 SIVA ....................................................................................193 NORMAL .............................................................................194

INTRODUCTION Writing these poems is like collecting the bubbles that stream away from the stern of a small boat crossing a vast ocean. They are all different. They are all the same. Fragile, inconsequential bubbles of livingness. The subject matter ranges from Oxford with its colleges, rivers, scholars and ghosts to the Far East with its hunger for life and concrete jungles, and its two and a half hundred-year-old Buddhism. Here, Theravada monks still proclaim, in the Buddha’s own words, “All things are suffering, all things are impermanent, all things are not self. Nibbāna is the Highest Happiness”. Everywhere is the contrast between the teeming multiplicity of life and the utter freedom of the Unconditioned State that runs like a crack through the Universe. Through this crack, beings escape from the burden of becoming. Through it they return again. From one lifetime to the next. From one moment to the next. Stillness is the space between movements the crack in the universe the gloved hand with the art to pull apart two thin life stitches and let a stab of nothing in. i

Part One BLINDNESS KINDNESS

THE WOMAN AND THE SAINT The woman came to the saint. It could have been worse, she could have sent for him. She said, “I seek understanding.” The saint asked, “Who are you?” “I am Elizabeth Doreen. I am 27. I am married and have two children.” “That’s not a very good start,” said the saint. “But it could have been worse.” “How, father?” “You could have been twenty-eight.”

FOR MOTHER AND CHILD Why wake him? You woke to nothing, do you think he won’t? Your hand will guide him firmly and away, your lips will teach the nonsense he will say, your sins on him every day. At best, he’ll pass the test you failed, but where you won will be undone. At worst, putting him first, you’ll chain his mind to you in front and you behind. At worst/best you pierce his blessed darkness, take his vision and fix his sight on the broken splinters of your light unmercifully shining: a savage in a hole dragging the sons of light to gaze at shadows on a wall. It’s not the tomb that leads to hell, it’s the antiseptic smell that opens on the womb. There are the white-coated and the flower-carriers smiling in their blindness, goaded on by kindness. Always, behind the chalk, the cruel admonitory talk, the printed notice and the pen, 2

the forcing on to make them men, - the kindness; the blindness-kindness, the training of all that can be trained. Do they not realise that building is for gods? Cannot even the wise think it odd that a man must slave for what he cannot have? Is it left to be the knowledge of the few that life is only something to be got through? You neednâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t wilt or tire, nothing need be built any higher.

THE HAPPIEST OLD The happiest old have nothing and donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mind. The happiest young are old before their time. Few these. The others are behind their years, suffer thirteen-year-oldsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; fears into their twenties, and in their forties have appetite for sins of twenty. But not the bite.

THE SUDDENLY SEPARATE SPIDER SENTRY STILLNESS is the space between movements the crack in the universe the gloved hand with the art to pull apart two thin life stitches and let a stab of nothing in. An eye with sky behind for mind, a face blind, a sunflower petal falling stamen to earth; or bird-song-bird calling either side of the path. No eye to meet your eye. FACES are petals falling (bird-song-bird), tongue shapes are spaces to be heard. Behind lip and fall nothing at all. Only this petal or that to choose to lose to stare at. FORGIVE a pronounâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s entry along a spine, a suddenly separate spider sentry wanting to define his continent of cells, wanting another a more than mother brother. Like whispering shells sharing a spark the sun let fall into their dark. 4

NOTHING will keep nothing warm, Form alone contents with Form. And so put out the need for the note scrawled on the music page, the cricket in the icicle. THE FRUIT is in the stone already grown. The cells group to fill already forming shells to keep out out. This is where lion lies down with lamb: in dried skin dried blood powdered edges broken flame particles on particles the same, and again in the bone clutch of the brain, groupings, twitchings, pullings, tame. Slippings and slidings on a wet palette. LEAVE the child to his darkness.

JOE-CHAIR The Joe-chair separates into Joe and chair, into one that is there and one that waits; who has chosen to wait SOMEWHERE ELSE.

A SHELL A SHELL a big shell on a warm sand shelf building long and strong out at last kept out. TIME to decide whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inside for inside meditation for contemplation. Any answers? A SKULL a big skull with a warm snug self building long and strong to keep out out. EYE, ear and brain drag it all in again, sense saturation. NEVER alone. No time to take advantage of the bone.

A TREE CLIMBED OVER THE WALL A tree climbed over the wall to give us its shade and its cool and asked for nothing back at all. Except, perhaps, the wall.

MATTER IS DEAD Matter is dead, dead or dying. And in it, craving craves its dissolution, rehearses dissolution. Expense of energy in voluntary death. Do not keep it young or leave a creaky scream unwrung, a forbidden song unsung, a sin unsunned. A pleasureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s but a pleasure, and on pleasureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wings a man gets high, remembers that sirens sing and dolphins sigh, that matter never matters.

WHICH DO YOU DO? Which do you do? Allow what is to grow? Or take a child you think wild and cut it down to know only the same imprisoned world as you?

M-M-M-M-MEUM That ivory head with flattened nose dropping like a plummet from scythe-cut brows to a girl’s lips, old man’s smile and thumbnail eyes painted black. A fat Chinese satyr in the fretwork crown. You say it’s yours? You know, the previous one said that a year ago.

YOU WORRY? YOU? You worry? You? Nobody cares. They may make sounds, give you talk, sympathy, a few smiles within bounds. None care beyond the question-answer-sympathy. Take them while they’re there; there is no empathy. Of course, others expect it too – like you; civilisation sits on that, alluring but absurd – and much too fat. 8

ON THE BROKEN AND TRANSCENDED On the broken and transcended the Light shines brightest having more shadows to contend with mended. On the dead and transcended the Light shines clearest, there is least of all there to contend with tended. Blessed are the Beatitudes for they bring rest unto the people. If any of the people will look past newspaper platitudes into a meaningful book. Blessed are the clear for their lives are refutations of the mumble and fumble you hear, are humble revelations of a world they’re incredibly near. Blessed are those who think before they speak and care not who’s around to hear, are something more than just another leak in the human plumbing gear. Blessed are those who keep their message short, whose lives say more than anything they’ve taught, who think straight thoughts.

DEEP DOWN TO DEATH Deep down to death with every breath and not one more for any faith. His skin has lost a glossy look. He only feels his single pain and waits for nothing to come back again.

HIM AND HER AND THEM A bare chest is a cooler way on a hot day than a string vest. Her husband’s pain’s a sword. And, again, though she sees and feels for him and keeps her love and cooks his meals for him, she is bored. It’s hard to be free no matter what you see; something to do with the guts or too many ifs and buts.

PYRAMIDS AND SARCOPHAGI Why did they spend so much time there in the anteroom of death? What could they prepare? Paper possessions as light as breath were too heavy for their dead to bear away from the fire. Why did they keep their eyes on pyramid, tomb and funeral pyre? Even the wise. Why did they go into the shadow and stare at the nothing there? Monumental keepsakes built with all the patience of eternity. Can we not wake from all these dreams of our identity? Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll not find time between breath and breath to hold them safe within your mind at death.

THE FALL Each tentacle which used to be anonymous is now by mutual consent autonomous. They may behave at first a bit like fools, but theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll do better when they know the rules.

IN A FLAT In a flat you think you could scream yourself to death and not be heard. Pressing your cheek against the cool of the sink. One breath upon another breath. No word for that. In a room, you suffer inside door, walls, ceiling, floor. You could shout, you could walk out, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not a tomb. In a crowd, you might suffer with everyone in, trade joy with everyone in; too loud to think alone in.

SMILE You, five feet away, can share the smile there. Take care; you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t possess, the smile may.

THE HUMBLE WERE GREAT ONCE The humble were great once. Only a dunce would wait to be great again; would be again insane. The genuflection sees the boot stamping and tramping in the wrong direction. Do not throw confetti.

YOU KNOW ABOUT VIETNAM? You know about Vietnam? You’ve been there? It’s all a sham. There was no war, no war, no view. For you the wallpaper was peeling. Is? Where? There? Still no war. The plaster’s flaking off the ceiling. Men who dream away a war with a barbiturate end where they end who participate. Where and what was the war then? 13

GARDEN FENCE REPAIRED Garden fence repaired covered wires dangerously bared repainted refitted screens new carpet unclogged drains old stains new patched old roof new thatched bad tooth double operation complained of an acute sensation died of heart attack. The lawn needs cutting round the back.

BISHOPâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S POEM Let them stay up late to calculate what is due to them and how to get it and what are you to them and donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you forget it. Fill your mind and let the mosquito drink her fill after her kind.

CHRIST SAID Christ said: “Give it all away and follow Me.” They even say that’s what he said and praise it, get their children spiritually fed (and then erase it). “If the spirit calls you, Go!” they say, and, as you’re on your way, “Hey! It’s only a metaphor you know! Come back! Let’s talk some more. You’ll have to pack. But come back. And shut the door.” The door, yes, door, any door on any floor in any city anywhere. Go out now. It doesn’t matter how you look. Go now. Put down the book, slip quickly out. Ignore the shout, don’t look back. Still there.

NO EXIT Oh Lord, I have terrified my soul at your graveyards where the spirits of your people thought to rest for an overflowering morning to recall the world in, regale themselves with memories in, tremble in the glory of their souls at what they please to call your throne. And all these yearning spirits who have tumbled half-asleep into their deaths, or taken them with eyes blighted, or been numbed into their graves with violence and fear, or wanted death and still been unprepared: - all these have framed a way of outward thinking and even something to look at, Lord. And it has served a purpose, kept both eyes in focus from their separating ways past your infinite divinity to an infinite blur in infinite space. And this they called your grace, lest it should seem a little strange that any God would take such pains to stand well in their sight, seeking approbation, adulation, in exchange for dubious delight; almost cap-in-hand to woo the happy band to a fitting consummation with all creation in reverse absorbed in Him. 16

A whim which only an invented God could think and not also think it odd. But it has served a purpose this deterrent for our eyes, and would do still were we not now content to fix our sight still closer along the street thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in the mind on the first thing that we find, still closer, almost at our own feet. Or lost in contemplation of a footprint, sacrificing sense to sensation, retreating further from the older dispensation, Lord. Footprint and foot, past and present too, equal mind rests to consent to. If only to avoid the tiny terror of where foot touches ground, the small silence where a thing in finding becomes found. Were we better bound with your cord, Lord? Our knot.

HICKORY DICKORY DOCK A girl pedals. A boy with the dream of her shirt in his eye rides the metal carrier behind, pressing her feet down with his. An individualist stays within call. My shoe cushions a small Chinese forehead pressing down her eyes for money. Another kneels her black passin into the sand fingering a tin, shells she has collected to sell. Her child rubs dirt into the bright stripes of his shirt. Bird-song-bird thing-word-thing sand-me-sea. One between two so that nothingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s seen without involving all the rest: she, pressing eyelids, he, with prosperous vest, leading all the world in as their relatives. This remembered and puzzled in sala-shade where I had come to meet and be alone with my friends one between two (involving infinity) â&#x20AC;&#x201C; when the sun burst into rubbery fire through the smoked glass of waving branches at the wind-open western side, 18

negating aloneness (or any other kind of activity), taking the form out of things and giving glorious light, swelling the colours on the bananas until they stained the plate. (Destroying a world of physics with one splash.)

A BUNDLE OF FEATHERS A bundle of feathers between leaves, sky filling in, binding together, something breathes. You start on the edge of seeing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; there! by the cart! Something is busy being.

SWEET BAUM One foot on money, one on moon. Not funny! Disembowelled soon.

CUT INTO THE HUMAN WOOD Cut into the human wood chop; pare; to find what is already there. Will the knife reveal what we have outgrown? Or does the sculptor feel along the veins and in the bone the shape already in the stone and gently, where the stone is brittle, cut only not too much and not too little? Or there again, you might be just the wall, my favourite picture on its hook; behind (if I should ever look), nothing at all. Like sea with sky reflected deceiving me, by birds rejected.

A CANDLE AND ITS CONCEPT A candle and its concept played either side of the glass, each refusing to believe it was not where the other was. The candle is to the moon what the moon is to itself - matter becoming light for any outward-looking sight.

TO THE BELIEVERS IN OUR GOVERNMENTS Do you really think the others are any less stupid than you? All history is prejudiced and gossipy, all science misuse of the misunderstood. But nobody waits to understand. There is no time jump on use it you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t refuse it itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll make you happy whatsitmatter whatitsfor? A clumsy reaper might drop his scythe, put out an eye, bad luck. A clumsy airman might drop his bomb, put out his civilisation, bad luck.

NOBODY WILL HEAR YOU DEAD Nobody will hear you dead. It may be in time someone will remember something you said. Someone will forget. Death is not an end to a beginning. It unseams existence. Einstein is running, just ahead of darkness. 21

WHAT SHALL I DO? Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a lot to be said for a balanced world stable and well-fenced-in, that plays early that prays late and industriously fills the within. This worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a strange place to find one another with alien flesh labelled father and mother. Flesh is just dust in a clearing of air. And air? A flicker of light-waves out there. Yet the masses still form and the movements take place. Two faces stare blankly back from the glass, that of a mind and that of a mask. So let us watch shapes, shapes and their lovers, praise them and give them their due and beg them, discreetly, to let us in too. There is no molecule but strives to be the whole (or if it canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t encompass that, a soul). They slide together each to each like spider crabs to scavenge a whole beach and sucking each its tremor from the rest contrive to make their own illusion best; so each to each binds close behind their targes. Swa priketh hem nature in hir corages.

YOU ARE AT PEACE You are at peace and someone comes, thoughtless not unkind, and jogs you with his moment; demands your recognition, your admission, your consent to his place in your mind. What do you do? What harm has he done to you? What calm had you won and no room for him inside?

THE PUNISHMENT FOR LISTENING IS HEARING Maybe the ostrich is right. Not to be told or hear the cruel joke is not to have felt its spite. Things will happen one way or another. All he need do is hold his breath, and take care not to smother, or choke.

GREAT MEN But really you see there weren’t any great at all. Those may not have stumbled, heads high, walked tall, filling the silence where others mumbled. But words fail skulls fall. And before? Before, they could taste, smell, see, tell, bore. No different from you and me. This is the way the world comes in - unless you see the blood spilt it’s only hearsay. Greatness. We have held a glass over the antics of a certain class driven frantic by thinking that what you cannot see can in some way still be yours. We have magnified their lunacy. If we hold the glass elsewhere, So long as we have never been there, we might uncover, rediscover, happiness. You should not wait to be great. It’s bad enough you’ve got the wrong direction. Don’t add an ulcer to a bad digestion.

NOW Now. Sit down. Let go. Tomorrow’s now will be no more than this - another was. Nothing is enough to distract your present thought. And your present thought is only movement between two points, a wave that leaves the water behind, plotted by an electrical mind. So take your nothing. Now.

LIONS AND LAMBS Lions don’t lie down with lambs because they know lions don’t lie down with lambs. They lie down with lions and eat lambs. Lambs know this too and never try on lying down with lions. If you want to be meek and mild and fat, a field with a fence is the place for that.

WALKING Everywhere there are people walking, walking the edge of bright flame broken by waves, past palms which rattle their music, and shade the hollows of the sand. But everywhere there are people walking. Bird hatches what bird has made, would blood and hormone brood on a hump of sand?

WHAT’S THAT? What’s that? “An insect.” An insect? That! Dragging a fly along a stalk with a buzz and crackle that fills a world down there. That? Your “insect” is in a glass case on the table, dried out to illustrate its label. Between insect and word another insect. Between word and insect another word.

SPEAKING STATUE “I’ve never filled up my body before, I’ve always been somewhere else too, and though I have seemed to be touching the floor, I was, sometimes, no more so than you.” 26

MY HEAD IS CLEAR TODAY “My head is clear today, the heavy morning stayed away or lost itself in sleep. Clear, open-sensed, I keep an eye where a light beam bends round the senses at the dreamy edges. In the slow growth, in the egg of a dream, in purple darkness, pushed up by root warmth, I saw a wing and two knurled threads tasting my dream, the first that did not fade. This stayed, sharing his compound eye.”

ANCIENT MARINER TO CLERK There is no excuse for wearing a collar that nips the skin, not much excuse for sharing the carriage they squeeze you in, and what excuse for fearing the box they’ll put your body in?

THE CUSHION The cushion lies with altogether a more subtle glow and presses down upon the chair. The chessmen stand in broken, mobile row, the camel knights with sharpened teeth wait there. The air bounces on the crickets, the clouds are splashed by sea on sky. Quiet, green-consuming thickets shade scars by things that fly and die.

THAT BIRD That bird with tail as dry as grass has heard is watching me between a peck at under feathers and toeing up the sand has questioned my stillness and quietened its heartbeat below fear. But still watches.

THE ROAD AND THE HILL The road humped over the hill and dipped and out of politeness we dipped too and didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go as the butterfly did straight across and into the view. We stayed outside and behind our faces as the road curled steeply down from the sky though the birds still saw it all as flat with an unblinking eye. Down here the houses have slid together and startled a stream from a handful of stones and clamped it down with an old stone bridge to stop it snapping at their bones. And the stream, we see, serves everyone, spins a matchbox through a private forest, splutters for one who stops to rest and scrape his shoe and cough the drizzle off his chest.

LONG ANTENNAE The long antennae of green fire snap. Each clump blurs into sky. Only varnished palm spears stay sharply near, to put infinity the other side of here and save the finite eye.

US AND THEM The tree relaxes there with no thought of going anywhere. Bird-song-bird. The song is overheard. Perhaps we invent the birds. They might invent us if they could spell. Freak! They don’t even listen when we speak. Just as well. Foolish cat plodding around like that what does it think it’s at? We are trying to show what we know; that simplification was always wrong, that a General Truth on a General Matter will emptily clatter…….. But where does the cat belong?

OEDIPUS COLEOPTERA Under the edge sat and waited a beetle glossy and fat; under the hedge, another (his mother). They met and mated. Neither minded enough to be blinded. 30

TOMORROW In a room in a house in a country far away from this one, sat four men. Simultaneously they realised that they remembered nothing, not even who they were. The oldest spoke first. “Well,” he said, “I must find out who I am. I mean we all must. It’s vital.” “I’m not so sure,” said the second. “We mightn’t like what we discovered. Perhaps it would be better to start afresh. I must think it over. Mustn’t make a mistake.” “I’m going to start this one from scratch, and I’m going to make it a good one,” said the third. The fourth did not glance in the mirror as he walked out.

Part Two GOING OUT THERE IS NO OTHER

GNOMON The shadow of the gnomon slides at a steady rate. Even if the dial is ancient, the time itself is up to date. Though the train sleeps in the station, the sun just will not wait. And the ever moving sun and the clocks that tick and chime are the chains we use to bind our minds and imprison them in Time. Time has no bird, no scythe, no power over man or Fate. Having wanted to be early, we decide that we are late.

MON SEMBLABLE Look for it, you will not find. Flee it, you cannot escape. It shines, unbidden in your mind, is both the shadow and the shape. You cannot hold, or change or lose it. You cannot welcome or refuse it. You did not make or break or choose it. (Take good care just how you use it.)

FOUR SEASONS Spring This springtide was not something to excite the senses but an overflowing of the heart. Pure joy. ‘Love thou the rose but leave it on its stem.’ An overflowing of the heart which sees its images, reflected everywhere, existing nowhere but in itself. Always the sun shines in Portsonachon, in Wien, in the silence of the mind. ‘Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage.’ This voyage (with Rilke’s Silent Angel looking on) was it a beginning or an ending? ‘Les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-là qui partent pour partir.’ No beginning then. And no end.

Summer But Ulysses in his boat is vulnerable to a sea world of storms of voices of rocks and all the subtleties of time. 36

And not all voyageurs complete their voyages. Ulysses, too, returned alone. The summer sun is hot and yields no shade. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Chacun jardin a sa particuliere fleurâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. But this summer the whole garden is alive with a cornucopia of flowers and fruits. Cornucopia, the sign of the Goat. The overflowering energy of the goat. Everything ever sown struggling for instant recognition. La particuliere fleur is there somewhere. Somewhere. On its stem.

Autumn This Autumn was not a season of mellow fruitfulness. This Autumn the sun burned with a heat not felt in history that can be recorded. The garden gave up fruits from plants that had slept for millennia. Ulysses and Circe, The Mariner and his Albatross, Michael and Lucifer, The Wastelander. All play out dramas in a desert painted by Dali. In this desert even Rilkeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Angel cannot stand. Nothing stands here. 37

The building blocks of Greece and Rome are made of the dust of this desert. Hot, dry dust. This desert awaits the fire that burns at the end of a kalpa. All lose their way here because all ways lead here, the good, the bad and the uncommitted. The rose and its stem are made of the dust of this desert. Children build their sandcastles here and mouth sounds to give them names, “mine” and “yours.” No-one’s. This dust belongs to no-one.

Winter Winter comes with A Winter’s Tale of all that has gone before. Ulysses toasts his feet before an Ithacan fire dreaming of Ilium. Letting go. Letting go gain and loss. A winter’s tale – words upon a page, ripples upon a mind like ripples upon a sea. The wind drops sea becomes calm. Where are the ripples then?

Mind lets go. Where is Ilium? Où sont les neiges d’antan? Did anything happen? Does anything happen? Où sont les neiges d’antan? In this flat calm of total peace can anything exist?

WEEKEND PEOPLE Though the weekend people leave it all behind, when they sit down quietly it’s all there in their mind. And though they leave their footprints to commemorate their stay, when the cosmic tide comes in, it washes them away. The sand, the rocks, the buildings, though private (and insured), the pictures, frames and gildings – nothing has endured. The cosmic tide has taken them and their owners too. (And when they sit down quietly it’s all there in their mind.)

SCIENTIA CAUSARUM SUFFICIENTIUM When we were very young we dug up the ground to find Australia. Australia was out. A few old toys were all we found. Because we were here we wanted to be there. Because we were dark we wanted to be fair. Because we were thin we wanted to be fat. Because we were this we wanted to be that. We longed for the country for we lived in the town. We wished we could have fair skin because our skin was brown. We had black hair but we prayed for gold. Because we were very young we wanted to be old. When we were very young we dug up the ground to find Australia.

MODERN TIMES The shoes walked in all by themselves, the left and then the right. Mr Brown was quite surprised, Mrs Brown went white. “Our feet were hurting us,” they said. “We think they were too tight”. “We left them at the door,” they said. “We left them out of sight.” Mr Brown gave a thoughtful nod, Mrs Brown looked odd. “We need a slightly smaller pair, narrower too and slim.” Mr Brown looked at his wife. Mrs Brown looked grim. “The feet are all we need,” they said. “We’ll leave the rest behind.” “You’ll do. There’ll be no mess,” they said. “We’re sure you will not mind.” “Just a nice neat seam,” they said. Mr B began to smile, Mrs B began to scream. And though she screamed and screamed and screamed, they took them, as they said they would, and left her nicely seamed. Mr Brown gazed after them, surprised at what he saw, and gave a long and thoughtful stare as a hat came through the door.

GAUDEAMUS, IGITUR, IUVENES NON SUMUS To Redmoor which was neither moor nor red came Europe’s representatives of the future’s youth, wartime born and wartime bred, in the salad days of their quest for truth. To camphouse where they would be fed to wooden benches where they could be sociable to open fire and table-tennis table. Space for football and for recreation. Tents for sleeping under musty canvas with damp, sweet scent of crushed, decaying grass. (And, for the sexes, proper segregation). The future came to fenland’s other Eden from Serbian hills and Flemish lowland, from Norway, Germany and Sweden, from France and, once, from red-starred Poland. Young Norwegians their seventeen years denying, accustoming themselves to such high-flying, got drunk in local pubs on local ciders. Hashish was unheard of for the up and rising and Aldous Huxley’s heavy advertising for mind-expansion for would-be “outsiders”, soon to intoxicate half a nation, had not yet filtered to this generation. Too early for such metaphysic pleasures, the young here spent the treasures of their time in picking (and bruising) apples, in singing, “dites-moi, pourquoi…”, in linking (and bruising) hearts by falling, eagerly, but unprepared, in love. To Redmoor they had come to meet the present and to understand the frown the present wore on the face of Mr. Ayres, who drove His Bentley round His Land; 42

and to meet the smile, the trench coat and the daily cares of his foreman, college-educated Mr. Moore. He played the organ after tea to bring a little harmony and reason to a constant struggle with the seasons. He struggled on with blight and rain (he struggled also with an inner pain). Mostly he struggled with the past, which took the form of yesterday’s farm workers. These had resisted William and his Normans and formed a kind of ancient rustic circus, contemptuous of college education (though not of its younger, foreign and more nubile creations). To Redmoor they had come to learn (even if they thought they’d only come to earn), to learn to ease their tongues round unfamiliar sounds (and ease their hearts through unfamiliar wounds) to trade a fragile, lonely freedom for the labyrinthine maze where feelings lead them. They came to meet and sing and work and play, to save and spend, laugh, cry – and go away; to repay the talents they had had to borrow, move on and keep appointments with tomorrow; to play their parts in Europe’s slow decay; to have their families, gain degrees and honours (and tolerate the weight mortality lays upon us). To Redmoor (which was neither red nor moor but just a name) they came and went, and forgot. Say, what did they come for? 43

HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE At Heathrow, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a picture window to watch the iron birds go through their paces. There are tears and tired faces, goings, comings and leave-taking; and children in that limbo which is neither sleep nor waking. Why do those that love part so soon, hurrying to give hostages to fortune? There is a rustling of many languages and a metallic voice which warns of unattended baggage (which may be destroyed) of unattended cars (which may be removed) of unattended names (which are wanted at Information).

HERE AND NOW The broken birdâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wing at your feet shows where hope and hopelessness now meet.

FROM HAMPTON COURT TO BLOOMSBURY SQUARE Rose Gardens Wolsey did not live to see; marble carved to mimic linenfold; panelled corridors (window seats for you and me); scurrying sparrows, timidly bold. In the maze they pay to lose their way. “Pas 'ci! Pas là!” “Allons! Moi, je m’en fous!” Through corridors of leaf and branch stampede nor seem to see that we are in there too. Why make a map to plot one’s escape on it when we can stay well lost and with no risk at all and then be saved by modern electronics through a green door in a green and living wall? ~~~ A girl in eighteenth century attire serves in the King’s own dining room to satisfy our need. (If she wait for William to sit by his fire, she will wait long indeed.) ~~~ The Rosetta Stone has waited longer still to be deciphered as footprints of the human will. In black basalt, it lets Ptolemy’s decree speak, trilingually, to you and me. The Egyptians took their love of life into the grave with souvenirs to help the disembodied Ka pursue its way through Osiris’s maze and save its toys and lovers for a sunless day. In later years they made and lost their way in life as surely as they lost their breath. 45

We wander slowly arm in arm past statue, script, sarcophagus and stone, and, while our blood runs warm, have little need of amulet and charm, exchanging living hieroglyphics of our own. In Bloomsbury Square, lamp-lit trees embalm the silence there; giving a little ease and charm to the hardness of the benches. This is how the poor are, having only one another. In shades of grey and blue Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aging wealth stares and senses it has nothing of more value than these two. The light fades to the parting time of day. The 7.20 carries mon semblable away.

FEMINA DOLOROSA She passes like a shadow across a silent floor, lit by a sun that follows and a star that goes before. And though I know she walks in beauty that is not subject to decay yet she shelters behind duty from the glory of the way.

MIRROR Swimming in a Cornish sea – Porpoises! (not Cornish) a little way from me. How far? How far from splashing foot to streamlined tail? Following the brain down its mazy trail – thirty yards? a million years? Too far? Not far enough? But eye to eye (inner eye to inner eye) it’s not so far from grain of sand to spinning star. Here wave is sea and sea is wave once more, no them no me, a timeless beating on a timeless shore. What a place to be alone (alone with one’s friends) in such a busy, splashing sea; alone with all the world (and you and me).

SHELL The great doors swing on noiseless hinges oiled by the tears of a thousand years, keeping the outside out. The doors are the doors of the heart’s desires, trying to possess the eternal fires, trying to keep the sun in. 47

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW The pulling string, which is Time’s tether, brings and binds all things together in the contoured galleries of our minds. Piaf has been dead these thirty years or more and yet her voice is bought and sold in any CD store. Yesterday and tomorrow, mingled joy and sorrow, are raw material for the present mind to spin its webs and bind. Only the present acts, begins and ceases, holds, releases. The other tenses only seem. They make a mockery of our present senses and merely dream the time away. Release this present moment from its treadmill, this trudging on from ‘was’ to ‘will’. Locate the very pinpoint of the here and the now. See the very pinpoint disappear in a gust of autumn laughter – leaves falling through bare and empty rafters. “Oh God,” said Hamlet, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” If Lord Hamlet would let go his dreaming, he would be king indeed! 48

TRENINNOW LANE Treninnow Lane is tangled dark and overgrown with angled beech and arching sycamore. No cars drive down and fern and nettle, dandelion and dock slumber in this extraordinary summerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s heat. Spidersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; webs are spun tight and Speckled Woods and Tortoiseshells meet, lifting and drifting, in and out of pools of sunlight (on the very edge of seeing in and out of being). This is an old track; ancient scents and birdsong; old ghosts who cannot find their way back and have no courage to move on hover round the puzzle of some past event with an extraordinary gracefulness, caught within a fragment, half-insight, half-forgetfulness. You walk here too, an exile with your smile and your eyes most innocently wise (in and out of being, on the very edge of seeing).

ROSETTA STONE To the British Museum in W3 in very different company. To an Egyptian archaeological mortuary; dismembered torsos and massive heads, disjointed arms and shattered legs; imitations of flesh and bone in granite, sandstone, marble and obsidian. Mirrors of souls buried in oblivion. There, the many who swarmed along the Nile and lived and loved among a host of enemies, stare with dead eyes and frozen smile with a rich, dark hunger to reawaken in the sun. Broken friezes, unhinged doors, fragmented pediments, mosaic floors, gold necklaces that have outlived their necks, failed amulets â&#x20AC;&#x201C; all trawled from these Egyptian wrecks. Trawled by English gentlemen from a many layered human tragedy. Gentlemen on grand tours who came to pick and choose from what an ancient people made and were made to lose by Nubian, Ptolemy, Roman and Ottoman; â&#x20AC;&#x201C; these more concerned with slaves and human plunder than with these artefacts which you have seen and which have made you wonder. Here in this place they rest, each with its space, its lighting and its label; â&#x20AC;&#x201C; delicacies upon a cultural table. For whom? Today, for whom? 50

Today each room is like a formicarium. A mass of students represents the human race. An apian hum of languages from those who stare, drink coke and share their sandwiches in this Temple to Impermanence. These, having fed on historyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desiderata, come out into the sun, hold hands and heed the pigeons that have also come to feed â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but not on culture. Their sense is for survival. They have no need to be embalmed like the Sumerians or charmed like antiquarians. They have no artefacts to give providing vital cultural data. They merely try to live a little longer and die a little later.

THIS YEAR This year mixes spring and summer here, a sharp wind chasing baking heat. Hawthorn hangs like snow in clusters with gorse and last yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bracken at its feet, turning the whole cliff into an in-between season. Beyond the hills lie great fields of daffodils balancing organic gold against a leaden sky. These the farmers grow instead of food. This they are paid to do to keep abundance low and prices high. Below the cliff at Tregantle another kind of fruit appears at low tide; mines sown half a century ago, relics of an earlier generationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s resistance to invasion. Someone has been blowing them up with great enthusiasm. At each explosion, the gulls and jackdaws scream and fret (and, having screamed, forget). But I remember. These bombs were planted in your fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time and mine, as they struggled to survive a rising tide which, win or lose, derailed their lives and shadowed ours with clouds that have retreated to a new horizon (but will not go away). 52

MID-SEPTEMBER SUN Dry and ripening: sea flat and shining like burning glass. Gulls floating like ducks on a giant’s pond. Small Coppers, Blues and Hairstreaks playing like blown leaves in parched grass. Victoria plums, blackberries. This is the turning of the year when all that is thought of as ‘there’ is found to be ‘here’, when harvests are collected, lifetimes are inspected, (next time’s cosmic seeds selected) and the traveller sees fear in his handful of dust. (In his handful of dust.)

11TH HOUR, 11TH DAY, 11TH MONTH November Rose. Pink and white and mauve. Solitary, still, among the rosemary and late autumnal gorse. Sea winds have blown. The first frosts have frozen the short grass. Spring and summer are memories, midwinter an echo in reverse. November Rose for the dying. November Poppies for the dead, who cannot sleep but stream towards new birth; whose pain outlasts the bitter Flanders earth.

ET EGO IN ARCADIA June, nineteen fifty-seven. A Little Hadham afternoon. Three sets of tennis in an English garden, a fading English view of heaven before the sunlit English shadows harden. (In what is seen is only what is seen). Tim’s plimsolls – courtesy of his sister – cause feet of different shape to blister. Feet now immersed in bowl of water and nursed by soothing hands. Maternal disapproval for the daughter! (In what is felt is only what is felt). Mother and daughter (and temporary nomadic guest) share a car which rolls on to the gates of Wimbledon. Here Ashley Cooper demonstrates the latest brand of power before falling to the very best, the hero of the hour, Hoad. Lew Hoad, blue eyes, blond hair, muscled frame and cultivated fitness. All England champion of the Little Hadham game. (In what is heard is only what is heard).

June, nineteen ninety-four. The Olympian contemporary of the temporary guest fades away, despite blond hair, blue eyes and being best; despite cultivated fitness, is witness to impermanence. On Finals Sunday Hoad is dead. (In what is thought is only what is thought).

PLUS Ă&#x2021;A CHANGE The world still piles storm on storm, (though happiness remains the norm). The spider mind spins thought on thought (and in its own web still is caught). The sun (still) shines in a bucket of water (and doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get wet).

ARMISTICE DAY 1993 ‘Died some pro patria non dulce non et decor.’ So Ezra Pound adapted Horace’s lines for those whose sufferings for their nation had bred a dull, dark, painful generation with gloria cauterised from their minds. In the calendar their deaths are still recorded. Poppies and medals and uniforms are worn. Services are held and sacrifices lauded. Public concern and private grief are borne. On a cold November day. In a cold November wind. In Oxford 1993, in remembrance of their sufferings and trials, cars are towed untidily from St. Giles and scattered without symmetry in surrounding streets. To protect old rememberers from new bombs. This is the point where past and present meet. Cadets march tidily down George Street, to run the gauntlet of upper windows, from which insults are scattered like intellectual litter: ‘What a lot! What do you look like?’ Hard and bitter. This is the recompense the present shows, as they turn and turn about, from windows set in golden stone in upper storeys, which had been saved, no doubt, pro patria (sed cum dolore) by those who fell in thousands, cast like human litter, broken and bitter, upon the dying fields of Flanders. 57

What they fell for then is out of fashion. They too are not protected from jibes and slanders; and their spirits are blown down Broad Street, past Martyrsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Memorial (which commemorates others who died for a faith which is also out of fashion). Stripped of their glory, all like transcendental dust, seeking a refuge among the Just.

FURZE AND BRACKEN The furze and bracken is browned and a little battered. The Michaelmas daisies and brambles shine in the September sun. A Painted Lady slowly opens and closes its wings. Every moment is a fork in the road and every fork is always the same, the choice between right and wrong. And wrong is always arrogating to oneself things which do not belong. And right is always following the Light.

VISITORS AND VISITATIONS Up Hillcrest steps to where the crumbling, grey, defining wall becomes a bare and narrow ledge holding back the jungle of beyond. Honeysuckle, fern and bramble slowly amble and quietly digest the Hillcrest fence (a peaceful study in impermanence). On the boundary hedge, a green and flowering ivy has blossomed there in the late summer sun, and the still air has turned the ocean from a surfersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; paradise into a millpond. Butterflies have descended in a great cloud of Red Admirals, Painted Ladies, Small Coppers, with hover flies (and a wasp or two). A great crowd of revellers who flutter and feed jostle and pay no heed to the passing of the year, the touch of autumn, the fading of the here and now into a colder season yet to come. They stay all day and are content with the wholly present. And there is one who sees it all and smiles (and one who does not). 59

JUPITER SPINS Jupiter spins, they say, three times as fast as earth and thus enjoys a shorter day. They say the sun will grow and then, at last, burn up the planets which lie in its way. They say, the universe is growing or perhaps has grown and, having reached its fullness, is on its way to ultimate collapse into black holes of cosmic nothingness. They say â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and build new telescopes and peer further and further into outer spaces and dare not turn and look at what is here brighter than the sun and clear before their faces. And yet, when all is done, not there one dies but deep, inside, right here, behind oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes.

RAINER MARIA RILKE Fallen Angels dream of bliss and wonder how that led to this. Lotus rises from the mud, spirit cased in flesh and blood.

REQUIEM: ARMISTICE DAY 1995 This year the dead are blind and do not seem to hear our prayers. Nor do they seem to mind that we now own what they once thought was theirs. Here they shed no tear at all the pain they left behind. Now, when they come again, they only find echoes of the long-ago, and landscapes that they hardly know; deserted buildings, unpeopled streets, lonely corridors, empty rooms, where each his own image meets in every shape it now assumes.

TRANSCENDENTAL ROSE The yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first transcendental rose stands where the self-sown apple grows. No pride at being first is shown nor discontent at standing there alone. Among the rosemary and gorse it is its own and only source. 61

O.U.B.C Magnolia in flower in the corner by the chapel shines in the sharp October sun. Across the High and down Rose Lane, the Cherwell is brown and dapple from heavy September rain. Treading leaves gold and red, a runner puffs and blows his way down Christ Church meadow to where the Isis flows. During the summer someone burned down O.U.B.C., a score of boats and a hundred years of someone else’s history. A Jack Russell lies on a wall with its back to the ashes soaking up the sun; and a coot, with no sense of history at all, just floats. In Queen’s Lane, a squirrel scuttles under a 300-year-old door and into the Provost’s Garden.

THE SEASON The season slides to wind and showers and sharp hot sun (for rare half-hours) and all the world lays waste its powers pursuing what it cannot own. Then mists and fogs and hazy sunrise shipsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; dull horns and lazy gull cries. Now blazing heat (bone dry pails) sandy feet single sails. And thoughts slip in and out of being just on the edge of almost-seeing.

COMPASSION Pity the poor tiger, hungry, lean and sad. No-one really loves him, some think he is bad. Yet all he needs is loving and his own place in the sun and a steady stream of little lambs to feed him, one by one.

APRIL April was hot and dry. The red earth responded by blowing as dust in the wind. The green earth responded by smothering itself with flowers of a thousand colours. The Water Board responded by banning hosepipes and promising to charge more for redistributing the rain (if it comes). Butterflies appeared early. A full moon hung above the ocean like a portent. A comet lit up the north-western skies for two weeks. And in truth absolutely nothing happened. Shadows slid across the shining screen.

JUNE A dry June and roses and honeysuckle tumble in riotous flower down the path, below the gate, in anticipation of drought. They rush slowly (keeping vegetable time) towards the battlefield of fern and bramble which flows, inconclusively, to the cliff edge. Beyond, the sea. The mind takes on the colour of what it shines through. What it shines through are the products of mind itself from all our yesterdays. This is the dance of the mind with its creations (eternity with the products of time); a slow and formal cosmic dance to the silent music of the void. This wonderful and mechanistic dance flows on because the dancers are somnambulant. Who will wake them? The Palm trees have flowered for the first time; pushing ungainly spikes skywards in sprays of flowers like jasmine. Paint a tiger on the wall. Turn and run (in case it catches you). 65

THERE ARE SILENCES There are silences born of stillness; others that are discovered when something snaps: a cloud, a stick, a thought. (A life). Some voluntary. Some enforced. That boat on the horizon makes no sound though it cuts the sea in two.

BLACKBIRD What is that blackbird doing, that scuttles past my feet? Looking, I suppose, for something that it can kill and eat. Yet it slides and shifts direction with so much skill and charm that we need make no connection, “It isn’t doing any harm!”

CALCULATIONS Space you measure in feet and inches and shoes by where your big toe pinches; seasons by cherry, rose and snow, when may comes and swallows go: empires by rise and fall of kings; weather by rain and drought and flood; dead trees by whether the dragon sings, flowers by when they seed and bud. But how do you measure silence? Or the space between two thoughts? Or the point where forces balance? Or the product of two noughts? Or where the shadows fade to when the sun sinks in the west? Or how your deeds are weighed you as your life drifts into rest? Houses go from stone to dust. The builder is himself undone. The gate is broken and gone to rust. Nothing survives from sun to sun. What was there before the beginning lingers when stars now born are dead; in the absence of suns is ever shining; when nothing is thought and nothing said.

MOUNT EDGCUMBE Here the descendants of Bosworth Field built their Eden from forest, bracken, heath; bred partridge, pheasant, boar and deer, then cast their shadow of darkening fear, stretched out their hands and filled their woods with death. Built Tudor house and Tudor fort, enclosed the land with Tudor thought. Four hundred years from that to this carefully constructed wilderness. No man-traps now to stumble on, the deer remain, the boars are long since gone. The Tudor rides are proletarian walks where we can wander where the next road forks, through oak and elm and beech and ash, through hyacinths and primulas, daffodils and camellias. Down to where Lady Emma’s Cottage slumbers in quiet decay. But as for Lady Emma, she has “left and gone away”.

HOLLAND HOUSE - HOLLAND PARK To Holland House came Elizabeth Vassall, with wealth from her family's plantations. She had five children by Sir Geoffrey Webster and, at twenty three, created quite a stir when she left him for the third Baron Holland and his more exalted social station. She had attributes to surpass them all. Beautiful if autocratic, with a warm if calculating heart, though little taste for the democratic, except a fashionable admiration for Bonaparte. Now, with a name aristocratic, she felt smiled on by indulgent Fates. Willingly she had exchanged Jamaican darkland for monogrammed, wrought-iron gates, and fifty-four acres of wooded parkland! Lady Holland, Georgian siren for whom the brightest luminaries of the Age, Macauley, Scott, Disraeli, Dickens, Byron, shined their spotlights on her stage; her garden ballroom (once Jacobean stables), her imported dahlias, peacocks, chestnut rides, her liveried servants dispensing punch in ladles and, no doubt, equivocal asides. And yet, in not one hundred years, those same Fates â&#x20AC;&#x153;blind with abhorred shearsâ&#x20AC;? dropped on the House she had dominated with such aplomb a German incendiary bomb! Sic transit.

THE 1944 EDUCATION ACT Leaves blowing in a wind that has no origin (and no destination). Shadows falling on an ancient wall (fall and fade). Still the children watch the shadows fall. And learn and learn and learn to name them all (before they fade). Hands reaching fingertips towards a distant, uncomprehending moon; clutching in frustration (shattering its reflection in a puddle).

MEA CULPA Self-justification seeks to edit so that things donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t seem quite the same. The aim, of course, is to claim the credit (and leave someone else to take the blame).

JANUARY, JANUARYâ&#x20AC;Ś. Ice, thick, as I have never seen on Cherwell. Jagged, floating towards Isis. Low mists of ice-dust drift on Christ Church meadow and cool the blood of long-horn cattle standing ankle-deep in mud. A lame roe deer beneath the trees pauses, where the sudden call of coots splits the air. In the gardens of Trinity, all is order and harmony. January blossom from Japan, well-kept paths and lawns. Controlled and quiet. Magdalen is a small, medieval town; courtyards and golden houses, a Tower and a Park. Along Addisonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Walk, tall trees like sentries follow the stream which sidles out from Magdalen Bridge to turn and twist past the Deer Park with its white deer, (living, condensations of the mist). 71

24 MOLESWORTH ROAD The end of it all is always the same, the door you go out is the way that you came. What you created and built in the void, once youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve vacated, is quickly destroyed. It burns in the garden, is bagged up and binned, discarded debris a foil for the wind. The end of it all is always the same the door you go out is the way that you came. One moves on of course. The fruit lets go the tree. The voices of children fade into stillness. Mantras are no longer chanted. New hands disturb old dust. Nothing is lost for the mind is quite free. Not so the spirits that are left behind; the eye in the lower yard guarding a well long gone, the presence at the bottom of the stair, the shadow in the dining room. They wait and watch. They are still there.

EVERYDAY LIFE (DYING NORMALLY) Going out there is no other coming back there is no trace. As Eternity comes nearer-clearer, the brackets themselves have a smaller place. Meeting in a far-off future you will not recognise my face but will turn away to your then-close family in your then-dear corner of infinite space. April has spread out her wares, bluebell, primrose, polyanthus, gorse, rosemary, hawthorn, wild garlic, dandelion, apple. For a solitary robin that hops and stops and stares. It is easier to chop down an acorn than an oak. (The branch you bang your head on was an acorn that you missed).

YES Meanwhile I have been: cutting back brambles where they clutch at the passing skin; watching a golden sun failing to find a cloud to hide within; seeing your face forgetting to be tired and shining out across the decades then hesitating, (a tight-rope walker above Niagara); walking in the Druidsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Grove among ancient oaks in the cool of the day; sitting in the French Gardens as evening fades into mothlight and the magnolia shines and the last of the visitors has long since gone. Yes. I have been. I am.

SHADOWS We peer into the shadows where yesterday’s sunlight glows, trying to capture and hold yesterday’s sunlit gold. We peer into tomorrow to predict and plot where that sun will likely go (but where, perhaps, it will not). Today’s sunshine still blazes its disc ever overhead. Past and future are autumn hazes that drift through the land of the Dead. The land of the Dead. Dead. Remember the Light; the Light that shines in the darkness.

THE SUN SHINES The sun shines on the path silent and still. Either side shadows twist and turn calling on the mind to lose itself in a dance with its own reflections. 75

GOING OUT THERE IS NO OTHER Going out there is no other coming back there is no trace though one journey on forever still the mind is its own place. Still erecting fences facing (still incorporating doors) still vast nothingness embracing (and declining ‘mine’ and ‘yours’). Still the sun in silent splendour smiles its message through the Void that each and every golden sunbeam suffers where it has enjoyed.

SPRING The great rock spins a little closer to the Fire and all its creatures, born of warmth and of desire, crack shells, burst seeds, feed and breed and say YES. They burn gently, while they may, being born of warmth and of desire, until the great rock spins away, to tempests, ice, fog and hail, causing the lonely heart to fail, desire to fail. Waiting the return of Fire.

ORPHEUS IN EXTREMIS He turned his back on the graveyard and with the sad songs he had taken down into the stiff clay of the underworld like root-fingers still singing in his ears, walked towards the future. Before him floated her death mask, warmed by the pale fire of yesterdayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desire. Fire cools and the image faded to a fine gauze. The gauze dissolved into sunlight and was gone. The fountain of his music dried up into silence. He saw nothingness before him. He heard echoes of empty space all around him. He could not sing his songs alone. He doubted and, at the great iron gates of the Villa Rosa, stopped and turned. Instantly, the shadow behind him was swallowed up in the haze. 77

The weight and burden of his body struggled with the weight and burden of his mind as he stared back into the evening. Then, his purpose lost, he meandered back along a stream of being towards that quiet and uncommunicative grave. Beyond the Villa gates, by the fountain, in the garden of Proserpine, the late afternoon shadows touched the girl. She stretched her sun-warmed limbs and woke from her reverie, the fragments falling from her as she reached out to restrain them with the fingers of her mind. She looked around and, finding herself alone, sighed, and, with a smile of forgetfulness, rose and walked with quickening steps towards the sounds of evening beckoning from the town.

MIDWINTERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S DAY IN THE BOTANIC GARDENS Hippophae with clusters of orange berries on spiky twigs. Set in this ancient, yellowstone wall, which separates the formal walks from the marsh garden to the south, is the gateway (with gate long gone). At its base, nerines â&#x20AC;&#x201C; all mauves and reds â&#x20AC;&#x201C; spill over on straight, green stalks. Topping the pillars sit carved capitals from which grin down and stare weathered, lifeless heads, green-grey like the day. The sandstone rockery is winter-bare, the benches empty, paths sodden with trampled leaves; the gunmetal surface of the rounded pool dimpled with bedraggled water lilies. Squirrels chase, birds chatter amongst the pink viburnum and the yellow Chinese winter jasmine, with its tiny six-petalled flowers. Pink and white prunus clusters on spindly twigs just as it does on Chinese porcelain. Energetic buds of magnolia press upwards and away from the old, warped trunk that shelters by the yellow wall. A yew tree, planted during the civil war, has marked the passage of time in inches and now stands forty-odd feet high topped by a first-year magpie. 79

Time is also tracked by deep bells put forth by Magdalen’s pinnacled Tower to the north and answered (out of time) by Merton’s to the west. Yet, today, nowhere among man’s handiwork and mindwork is man to be seen. Magdalen Bridge is still and silent. Punts empty and unmoving. Blue and green. Dull and wet. Waiting for summer. The very images of men, the statues, have disappeared from recessed arches behind great terracotta pots decorated with cornucopia. To the east the Cherwell’s winter waters pass. The cricket ground, with its white and brown pavilion, its motionless rollers painted bright blue and green, sodden grass, is empty under this dull and pewter-coloured sky, the faintest luminescence shining through. Over three centuries ago this medicinal garden was created ‘to cure all ills.’ It has not yet quite accomplished that.

THE FOUNTAIN The fountain reaches upwards into space and, finding nothing to sustain it there, falls back into its proper place. And in this endless rise and fall, we see the start and finish of us all. Time flies through summer and through wintry skies; measures elephants and butterflies, marks where this is born and that one dies. See the world dissolve and fade before your dying eyes!

QUIETUS I am a patch of sunshine on the path (said the tiger) dappled and hard to see. The forest is quiet and waiting (said the tiger) no need for fear of me.

AMERICA, AMERICA We raised our hats to you, Mr Lincoln. We believed every word that you said. And when life spilled into darkness in a night of theatre, we believed, even though you were dead. From the decay that was Europe, we sent you our sons to escape from a thousand-year prison called home; from money and serfdom and warfare and guns; from Ireland and Germany, Russia and Rome. We believed, Mr Lincoln. We knew. We could wait. From the slave-fields of Africa, we heard all men are equal and America, like God, would apply it that way. And having applied it, would insist on the sequel; that all men were free in this African day. From Asia, the bent backs of our human machines learned of machines that would give them their rest; learned they could stand straight and what freedom means; and, holding heads high, put it all to the test. And what did we get from all the bright promise? And what did we learn when we gave you our vote? From a heap of dead redskins to a pile of dead commies, you could write the Lordâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Prayer on a used five-buck note.

MAGDALEN In the Fellows’ Gardens, past the Deer Park, a willow twists and stretches out of a brown pool like a giant Naga trailing garlands of green lace. Along the avenues of Addison’s Walk, among birch and beech, chestnuts stretch out their branches like semaphores, and hang their leaves like flags; green and gold and brown and red, signalling the turn of the year. Underfoot, chestnuts crunch into yellow loam and gravel. A Painted Lady, blood cooled by October, flutters by laboriously in the thin air. Michaelmas Term begins in high spirits and confusion. Crowds spill into the roads among bicycles and car horns and a sudden shower of thin rain. Oxford gets its annual infusion of fresh blood and celebration. Academics, who sit on high, lick dry lips in anticipation. Just like the empty shells of the Dead who followed Prince Teiresias to meet Odysseus at the World’s End, 83

by the River of Pain; to drink the red blood and recognise the Living once again.

UP TO DATE AND READY TO GO It may not be the bearded man who smiles at you and explodes. It may not be the errant tyre that slides on the icy roads. It may not be the scaffolding plank that bounces on your head. It may not be pneumonia that smothers you in bed. It may not be the fever that creeps through blood and vein. Or the quiet worm in the sole of your foot that climbs up to your brain. It may be that the breath leaks out in a mist of expiring pain and nothing can make it turn about and slide back in again. Ready?

IN AND OUT THE WINDOWS “In and out the windows as we have done before.” Moving in and out of being stopping just this side of seeing, in and out of life they pass, kestrel, robin, spider, mouse. Each their special shapes they wear, striving on from here to there. From here at the start of a brand new day to there where life just bleeds away. Filling up the time between crawling, walking, flying, creeping, laughing, shouting, humming, weeping. Still not knowing what it might mean. The leaf that shrinks and flutters from the unwounded tree is a lifetime’s education for you and me.

EXAMINATION SCHOOLS Stretching out Time. Drifting with the wind. Dreaming south in winter. Killing a tiger is easy, without risk from tooth and claw. See! It has entered the bamboo cage smelling the bait. Do not feed it and it will die by itself. There is a sharp March wind and a little stinging rain. The students seem unprepared for what is coming. Walking quickly along the High, many talk to themselves (just like the older tramps). There are more homeless beggars, some quite young and many quite ill. Christ Church Meadow is closed to keep Foot and Mouth disease out. (Or in.)

OXFORD: MICHAELMAS Christ Church meadow is awash with driving rain and a wind which bites the skin and chills the blood within. Its paths are sticky, yellow mud. And the Cherwell, brown and dull, slips ever higher. Ducks, moorhens, squirrels endure it. As they endure frost and ice and the teeth of pike, the ill-will of dogs and the harassment of herons. I retreat to Merton, and the medieval silence of its Tower. Greeted by the bell, I stand quite still in the chapel and look to the east through glass which escaped Thomas Cromwellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s iconoclastic rampages and still permits a medieval vision. The Tower grew out of 15th century wealth, at the high-tide mark of a millennium of Christian culture. Forty years later, Columbus set sail, carrying this Christian culture, and began the destruction of the culture of the New World (Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inhumanity to Man), inaugurating five hundred years of poverty and misery for its survivors. 87

Here. Now. The peace is palpable, the chapel empty. A patient fountain round which thirsty crowds swirl and turbulate in the December cold. They wander along St. Aldates and Merton Lane, through Magpie Lane and eastward up the High, trying to appease an undiagnosed, spiritual ache by scratching where it does not itch.

WHY? Because we have neglected much we finish up with such and such, surrounded by we see and touch. Because we have neglected much. Because we sit and dream (and dream) we cannot separate is and seem; images come in floods and teem. Because we sit and dream (and dream). Because we lose ourselves in thought (and all our errors are self-taught) in Māra’s nets we are well-caught. Because we lose ourselves in thought. We have to buy back what we’ve sold. We have to listen what we’ve told. We have to trade our young for old, (and watch our sun grow ever cold). We finish up with such and such because we have neglected much. 88

USE IT, BUT BE RIGHT I wish I was a millionaire could take it all and give it you and you and you and you and you and you and send you off to let you do just what it is you want to. Use it and be right. And so they left the millionaire and all went off to everywhere to do just what they wanted to. Use it and be right. They went. They worked. They played. They slept. They won. They lost. They laughed. They wept. From joy and pain came back again. One came back in a wooden box six foot long and bones were its locks. One came back in a miserâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fist with fingers growing through the palm. One came back with the peaceful eyes of those who have never done any harm. One came back with a crowd of friends and a fountain of laughter that never ends. But one came back as a star in the sky which twinkled and smiled as it floated by.

PATIENCE There is the patience of the tree, with feet set fast in earth; buffeted by storms, stripped of leaves by droughts, home to birds and parasites, bored into by beetles and worms, reaching to ever greater heights until sawn and dismembered by men, or turned to a heap of ash by the impatient hunger of fire, or felled by the lash of the whirlwind. There is the patience of the schoolboy by the open window through which the sun blazes, poised precariously between French verbs and sleep, while all the world outside lazes by the cool deep of the river. There is the patience of the owl on the beam in the silent barn waiting for the straw in the corner to stir. There is the patience of the cat waiting to kill and the mouse trapped on the window sill waiting to be killed.

HAPPINESS The great stone Hall is silent that is now millennia old. Through the western windows shines a glorious sun. It floods the walls and floors, the tables, chairs and doors, panelling, pictures, artefacts and illumines every one until the wraiths that gather cry out in their joy, ‘Everything is gold! Whatever is, is gold!’ A majestic cloud emerges from the southern sea, slides across the western sky blotting out the sun. Light through those western windows pales to a thin grey day. It dims the walls and floors, the tables, chairs and doors, panelling, pictures, artefacts pales every one until the wraiths in the shadows cry out in dismay, ‘Gone is gold, the gold is gone! All joy has passed away.’

UNFINISHED A face half in shadow in the gallery; sudden silence among the guests, candlelit at the long table below. Girls serving sherbet in the caravanserai. Before the whirlwind in the sandstorm’s eye tears up the desert. A severed head and the black mask of the executioner on Tower Hill. Broken masts and torn sails sliding beneath the waves and sailors crying, “Christ have mercy on me!” until their lungs fill with sea. A pewter plate on a thin chain let down from a barred window above the city gate. Swinging, to and fro, like tomorrow’s pendulum. Imprints in the mind from this lifetime or that or something altogether earlier; pressing against the edges of consciousness like a dream, 92

that is â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but is not what it seems, seeking its quietus. Shadows following footprints, looking to be reunited with last yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s feet.

PURITY In the dark tabernacle, a shaft of sunlight illumines the heart and shines through a million years of dust. Clouds and clouds of swirling dust spiralling through the light which spills in a golden pool on damp, grey stone and iron rust. When the light moves it does not take the dust there to it. When the dust slides into darkness, the light does not pursue it. Why then does the heart invent heart bruising burdens to shoulder? (Why does the heart consent to the illusion of growing older?)

LISTEN What is that sound? Like the trailing of a fan through a silent anteroom? It is the murmur of air ruffling leaves. It is the herald of the whirlwind which will strip those leaves from their trees and wrench the trees from the hillside and blast the soil from the rocks beneath, leaving the skeleton of the earth to bleach and crumble. And what is that sound? Like a cascade of pearls on a silver salver? It is the rushing of the waterfall in the Italian garden. It presages the tempest and the raging ocean which smashes earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s boundaries and drives the rivers back up to their sources, drowning and destroying everything that lives on air. And what is that sound? Like the crackle of dry twigs under the heavy boots of soldiers? It is the fire in the hearth, logs spitting, blue and yellow flame dancing under the granite lintel. It is the messenger of the Sun which will rage and burn the planet to a cloud of incandescent interstellar dust for the winds of space to disperse forever. And what is that sound? 94

High and plaintive behind the polished nursery door? It is the crying of a two-day-old baby. It tells of the heavy tramp of armies across the continents of the world marching to the rhythms of dark gods bringing the destruction of cities and the extinguishing of civilisations. It is the sound of an empty skull there in the desert, abandoned by dog and raven, dry and bleached and splitting along its seams, home to gusts of wind and the occasional locust. These are the sounds of the end of human endeavour, the end pages of books, the silence which silences the symphony. When the gums shrivel and decay, the teeth are cracked and broken and there is to be found no place where the smile or its shadow has ever been; no echo of long ago laughter. This is the sound of eternity.

BLUEBOTTLE MIND Even in all your fine regalia, hint of blue and buzzing wing all the trappings of your kind, you are far from being a substantial thing, and all your efforts end in failure. All entomic paraphernalia, proboscis, thorax, abdomen, wings that fly, six legs, antennae, multi-faceted eye, are merely dust imprinted with your mind. And so you flit from fruit to faeces to satisfy an endless lust, disintegrate into component pieces and so revert to where you started, dust. But even without dust to model and round a dusty world propel, you fly, quite formless, from your silent hell to where the nerve ends of the brain are curled. You are thought your body but its shadow; not from the maggot were you brought, but from the glow and from the fire of still unquenchable desire. The human here in all his pride, gives you sanctuary inside, eventually emerging to appear a bold facsimile of you with buzzing wing and hint of blue.

MINDFULNESS Watching the flow of middle-earth as all things go from birth to birth. Here, one can know what itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all worth. An empty tide of rise and fall. Nothing outside is mine at all; nothing inside nor large nor small. The mind reflects vague shadowy drifts. The mind connects blank mists with mists. The mind projects meaning â&#x20AC;&#x201C; where none exists. Rich and poor in ragged procession pass the door and dispute possession of what they cannot own; like dogs, growl and groan over an imaginary bone. Ever so long ago. Today. And ever-after. Tears will wash away your broken laughter.

YOGA Mind moves with the breath which fuels this articulated doll from birth to death. What starts out as routine maintenance for a puppet with entangled strings develops to a share in the dance of the dragon that eternally sings. But, first, the intention, clear and well-defined for the retention of the errant mind.

COMPLETING CYCLES The Juggler throws his batons at the sun. The sky throws them back again like rain, each and every one. Surely by now he knows what it is heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gaining? Come Mr. Juggler, look at it from your point of view, just how long has it been raining? On you?

FORK IN THE ROAD When you throw yourself down from the top of high mountains, the Earth does not take you into her arms and comfort you. When you kneel and kiss the ground, the Earth does not praise your humility. It is for this reason that she is called â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Great Motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Every moment is a fork in the road. And every fork is always the same: the choice between right and wrong. The wrong is always arrogating to oneself things which do not belong to oneself. The right is always following the Light.

SEEING THE OBVIOUS The fisherman sees the fish but not its pain until as fish he swims this way again. The rich see not the poor they have invented and, not contented, strive ceaselessly for more. Abraham’s descendants fight for their promised land, and while they swarm and fight like ants whose blood seeps into desert sand? “My village against the world, my family against the village, my brother and I against my family. Myself against my brother.” “Nature red in tooth and claw” contradicts Messiah’s Law. Virus, germ and parasitic worm burrowing in blindness do not respect the vegan’s kindness. Breathing is the road to the breathless; seeing the obvious is the path to the deathless.

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LISTENERS Where there are listeners there is no silence. Either the sounds of the listenersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; minds rebound from the boundlessness of space, or the universe itself pounds out a multivociferous chatter; the sound of reaching out, selecting rejecting and pain; coming together and falling apart again. Every plant, every stone, every sun has its tongue, its subtle and interminable vibration. Every whirling planet and spinning electron screams (or whispers) its history. Reaching out selecting rejecting coming together falling apart again. Pain. Where there are listeners there is no silence. The universal music thunders discordant tones the unintended harmony in its unintended composition; the sound of creation and of decomposition.

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ON GUARD The young cannot believe that the old were young once. The old have quite forgotten that the young were once old. Danger comes from the worlds, from the heavens, from the hells. Danger comes through the sense doors. Danger comes to the body which breaks and stumbles. Every lungful of air infiltrates microbes of destruction. Every spadeful of earth shelters a thousand enemies that writhe and wriggle, insinuate through cracks and fissures in the tissue of the flesh - and destroy. Danger comes to the mind which absorbs the subtlest poisons and provides a fertile, breeding ground for the subtlest of poisonous plants; to seed and germinate, overspilling in the ten directions. 102

Danger comes from having a body, having a mind; wanting a body, wanting a mind, wanting.

GOOD AND EVIL Evil is the Great Magician which blinds the inner vision, the painting on its face disorientates the eye, the quickness of its hand through space deceives the sly. The conjuror peddles his illusions, the world his backdrop and his stage, his victims, living beings enmeshed in their delusions who find their thoughts become a living cage. They end as karmic prisoners like the living dead trussed in silken thoughts made of magic spiderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thread. Goodness is the golden key which shows your face to me which seeks whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s true and shows my face to you; unlocks the heart of everyman and sets his spirit free.

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SATAN STILL FINDS WORK FOR IDLE HANDS Between the stairway and the stair, the Soul has sensed the Shadow there reaching out from somewhere grey; has felt the sunlight slide away. Between the window and the frame has passed the Rat that has no name to gnaw and chew and breed and tear and take your homestead as his lair. Between the doorway and the porch the Arsonist inserts his torch to spark the threshold with his fire and make your home your funeral pyre. Between one thought beam and a second Satanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s smoky finger beckoned and touched the Spiritâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s upward flight to charm it downwards into Night.

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MAKE AN EFFORT Matter is always inert; dense shadowy stuff that resists the shining. Leave the puppet to its own devices and how will it ever get out of its box? Who then is there to make an effort? And with what force from where obtained? The child, the kitten, the puppy have no idea that there are efforts to be made. Simmering with energy, breathing through the joints and strings, they almost make the puppet fly with pure enthusiasm. By what deity are they then possessed? Growing older, fires colder, energy wanes, puppet pains, lies down in its box. Shadowy and inert.

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HERE NOW runs like a crack through the universe. Through it beings escape. Between each step Between each movement Between each breath Between each heartbeat Between each living cell Between each thought Between each impulse light shines. Through the crack that runs through the universe now. No-one who grasps after even a speck of dust can squeeze through this crack.

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FREEDOM Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Everyman is his own gaoler; shuts the door and turns the key, ends up where he wants to be, looking at what he needs to see – you for you and me for me. As Māra teaches so we are taught. As a thing is thought so we are caught. Māra builds a bamboo cage, built for monkeys of any age. In the cage he puts his bait, then withdraws to sit and wait. Monkey comes (with wandering mind) to see what Māra’s left behind; slips his hand into the cage, feels the bait and holds it tight. Suddenly, he gives a shout, jumping up and down with rage. Though he tugs with all his might, he cannot pull his hand back out! The cage has caught another sinner. Māra’s got another dinner. What can poor old monkey do? He’s caught because he won’t let go!

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RETURNING TO THE ROOT The fretful Tiger in a rage prowls the confines of his cage. Do not feed him. Pass him by. And, of himself, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll surely die. The Gypsy, with her crystal ball, promises to tell you all. Do not cross her palm with gold. Leave your future woes untold. The wave that towers above the sea and rubs its chin against the sky, subsides where it will ever be. (Not being born, how can it die?) Delve into your heart divine (discarding thoughts of yours and mine). Permeate the stillness there and of its Silence be aware.

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CONTROL Who controls the reins, horse or rider? The puppet of a thousand strings or the mind inside her? Who impels the mind? The smile on the face at the front or ghostly fingers behind? Who pays the piper calls the tune. But he who dines alone picks up the bill.

DON’T STIR IT UP “Qu’ils mangent des brioches!” After that nothing could save her. Neither a French name nor having an Emperor for a father or a mother known in history as a “Benevolent Despot”. Nothing could keep her head on nor protect her body from being torn to pieces by female hyenas in human forms. How long before such a stirring up can settle? How long before such a sending forth of wounds can heal? 109

QUO VADIS? Follow your nose (Do you have any choice?) See where it goes. Listen to your voice. Hear which way the wind is blowing. Follow your feet. In which direction are they going? Whom do you meet? What seeds do they say that you have been sowing? The prisoner in the dock is in a state of shock, though he swears he can’t remember, they say he did it all the same. According to the records, every footstep bears his name. The courtroom’s quite deserted, no-one hears the things he says and the Judge’s head’s a mirror which reflects the games he plays. Ten steps to the scaffold and his name is on the block; the gates of rebirth are wide open (and there is no need to knock).

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TREASURE What comes through the door is not the Family Treasure. Faces at the window a light tap at the door; what do they show? (Who is it for?) The clouds build up as battlefields of steam, cannon, horses, guns. Warriors with swords and shields stream towards dying suns. Five golden chains bind the painted puppet (and restrain and entrap it). Five wires hold it firm and make it twist and dance (and squirm), perform its tricks (and, for reward, receive its kicks). Eye, ear, nose, mouth, skin and one thick rope holds (and controls) the mind within (and keeps it blind).

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NO EXIT Journeying from the beginning (of which there is no beginning), travelling for millions of years (which cannot be measured in millions or years), I have come, and go on. No stopping. Just the onward movement into the illimitable. For ever. No need to blame the wicked, their shadows are at their heels. No need to fear for the good, haloes of light enclose them in splendour. No need to talk of escape. Escape from this prison is a doorway into the prison yard and back again. This prison is moving and all-encompassing. There is nothing outside it to be escaped into. There is no escape from. There is only stopping. Where there is stopping, how can there be movement? If there is no movement, how could there be a prison?

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STOP! If stopping were easy, a thought beam properly directed would thread silently through atom after atom and bring the entire universe to a standstill. An empty mirror reflected in itself. If stopping were difficult, the spider mind would jumble on, piling thought on thought, trapped in its own web; the threads spreading out in all directions, the atoms like so many jostling beads dancing and tangling in ever-clashing patterns, keeping the entire universe in eternally pulsating chaos. A many-headed monster glaring at its own reflections. Not easy. Not difficult. A judicious response to the Problem of Pain. A letting go of all phenomena. Again.

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HAVE A HAPPY WEEK “Empty-handed I come and lo! the spade is in my hand.” In the illimitable Void All is destroyed (and Nothing is lost!) Everything appears anew: good seeds flourish (and evil too). They said to the Poet at his birth, “Go! Love! Without the help of anything on Earth.” A naked child eighteen inches long no teeth, no hair, no speech. Everything is out of reach! Yet once his mental powers are uncoiled, he creates cities, plagues and motorways to terrorise the world. So much, so soon, from one so weak! It should be child’s play to have a happy week!

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Part Three COMING BACK THERE IS NO TRACE

CATHAY Wu-Kih from the shores of proud Cathay shaded almond eyes, stroked smooth and yellow chin and gazed into the far, far, far away; then jumped into his yellow boat with single oar and sail and yellow coat to cross the ocean to some benighted land and give the denizens of darkness there a hand (a yellow hand). Seeing that the west was windy but the east was windier he set his philanthropic course for India! No sooner thought than done (or just a little later since Wu-Kih took a detour via the equator), he stepped ashore into the Heat of the Noon Day Sun. Delhi he thought smelly; Bombay a little tombé. Madras was crass. The only place not too bad was Hydrabad. Especially when he saw, seated all alone, upon a gilded Peacock Throne, a superb and regal personage, a combination of emperor and sage, stroking his moustaches and tugging at his beard so hard it made his mouth jerk open. Wu-Kih stood lost in admiration at this splendiferous visitation. And, bowing very, very low. his cheeks emitting a most yellow glow, he ventured shyly: “Who…You?” 117

“I?…Who I?” said the visitation with evident irritation, “I am the Nizam! That’s who I am! And who, my wily, oriental friend, might you be?” “I be?” “You be!” “I be Wu-Kih!” “Ah!” “Ah so! I am velly pleased to meet you, I am,” said Wu-kih. “I am verrry pleased to be me, I am,” said the Nizam. The Nizam stroked his moustaches. Wu-kih ran a finger over a smooth upper lip. The Nizam tugged his beard. Wu-kih tugged at a bald and yellow chin, mouth open to reveal the yellow stumps within. Wu-kih emitted an admiring sigh. A gleam appeared in the Nizam’s eye. “Well, my wily oriental precious, I think it would be most auspicious, if, while you were here, you met our local Fakir.” “Velly honoured!” said Wu-kih. “Indeed! You really ought to be!” Wu-kih stumbled down the hill to the cracked, brown earth of the Indian plain and saw a hairy head, a skinny frame, a mournful figure kneeling in the dust tugging matted hair, beating hairy chest. “You,” said Wu-kih,”You faker?” “I know,” said Bag of Bones sadly. “I cannot deny it. Just now trade is bad and things are quiet. But who, my illustrious, yellow shade, might you be?” 118

“I?” breathed our Hero, “I might be me.” The gleam that had illumined the Nizam’s eye appeared now in the Fakir’s. “Illustrious, oriental friend, you have reached the end of your beginning! Behold!” Wu-kih beheld. “Listen!” Wu-kih listened. “Watch!” Wu-kih watched. The Fakir reached out his hand and plunged it into a wicker basket on which was written SNAKES KEEP OUT. “Wait! Look!” cried Wu-kih. The Fakir waited and looked. “Well?” he said with stern surprise. Wu-kih could not believe his eyes. “Snakes! Keep out!” he said. “Yes,” said the Fakir, “It is a clear warning to the snakers to keepa out. So outa they keepa!” And after a momentary grope, out he pulled a long, brown hairy rope. “Jute?” said Wu-Kih. “Hemp!” said the Fakir. He threw one end at the sky. Up it went to the very top and there it came to a sudden stop. But down it did not fall again. It hung there, linking heaven to the cracked, brown earth of the Indian plain. Wu-Kih smiled happily: “You clever faker,” he said. “Oh no,” said the Fakir, “This is the real thing! You just watch!” 119

Lithesome and sinewy, rope gripped tightly by bony knees, loin cloth flapping gently in the noon-day breeze, hand over fist he pulled his bony frame up into the hot, blue Indian sky. Then, looking back down to from whence he came, he fixed on Wu-Kih his beady eye. “Watch!” he hissed, “and listen!” Wu-Kih gulped. Suddenly a thousand rainbows split the sky. Nymphs and Devas floated by. Tambours and sitars teased his ears with sounds that only a celestial hears. Fragrant flowers caressed the Fakir’s beard. Then, “OM!” he cried. And disappeared. A solitary petal floated down on Wu-Kih’s head. The nymphs smiled down at Wu-Kih instead. He looked at the nymphs and the rope and, with oriental heart pounding with hope, started to run like the very devil. Climbing up and scrambling till he was level with the sun, he reached where the rope ended without trace and peered into the wonder of infinite space. The nymphs he’d climbed up to meet here winked and smiled a wild, sweet leer. His mouth split open in a yellow grin. He tugged and tugged at his yellow chin. Intoxicated by the wondrous sight, he stroked an imaginary, yellow beard. “OM!” he shouted with all his might. “OM! VELLY OM!” “OH! AAH! UM!” 120

The mist before his eyes now cleared. The rope he saw had disappeared! Down he tumbled. Down. And down again. To the cracked, brown earth of the Indian plain. He landed on his skinny back with a thump and a jolt and a crick and a crack. Face upward to the hot, blue sky, he became aware of the Fakir’s eye and a little below and a bit to the south of a smile which danced on the Fakir’s mouth. “Well? My wily, oriental friend? You see? It really is the End.”

WAR OR PEACE War breaks out in the land of the golden calf or in the columns of the Daily Telegraph. Peace is found in cloister or hearth in intervals of war or the exhausted aftermath. Whatever declarations of war or articles of peace are signed, they flow from the labyrinthine meandering of the human mind.

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TREMATON CASTLE The great Bailey wall keeps the outside out. Inside, the silence settles like sediment in a pool. But there are sounds that do not disturb the dust and images that bend no light waves. A timeless, parallel world littered with the jetsam of Time. In the Keep upon its mound, orphans of Nothing can be found in its empty, castellated, stonework crown. In the Gatehouse, it is 1363. The Black Prince stares into the Court Room fire remembering Poitiers and Jean de France. Below, through the portcullis, white doves wheel silently, watched by two buzzards in the ilex tree. Among crumbling walls and doorways and archersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; windows, broken images of a millennium jostle and tumble; a pack of cards from Alice in Wonderland, blown and jumbled like autumn leaves in clashing winds. 122

The dogs chase, tirelessly, ever renewed and changing scents of badger, fox, vole and rat; then stop and quiver. There, by the dark shadows of the Sally Gate, Sir Richard Grenville meets his fate. And a housemaid hangs herself for allowing new life to take root in her. Who is it all for, this agitation of mind and hand, this accumulation of stones and dismemberment of the works of man? Who are the inheritors that stand as witnesses to all this? One old man. And two dogs.

PERSEVERANCE Racing along and full of zeal from A to B, how does it feel? No obstacle can block his way he forges on by night and day. No doubt the race is to the strongest to him who struggles on the longest. But what if, after all, the goal is six by two in a fresh dug hole?

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UPEKKHĀ Looking with dispassion, with equanimity, doesn’t it shine brighter than a thousand suns? The broken wing, the severed finger, the uncompleted life, ‘the smyler with the knife’, the smell of fear, spirochaetes, viruses and germs and the ever-chewing sepulchral worms? And don’t we see a thousand times and more that what we build and try to hold in place disintegrates, vanishes without trace? And what we hoard up and try to store provides a breeding ground for rats? And this, which is the Past, is also Evermore? What we cannot preserve here when we have felt the betrayal of the breath we save for heaven, taking our joys and pains across the no-man’s land of death and there, in finer, subtler, intellectual realms plant our standards. And still the Eternal, empty wind blows them down.

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METAMORPHOSIS Blood pumps into crumpled wings. Expanded, they reveal the beauty that it brings. There it hangs and waits for them to dry and then fulfils its destiny. To fly! To fly. To float. Taste nectar from each flower. Enjoy the bliss of its appointed hour. Soak up the sun on some south, sheltered wall and sun and dream until the end of all. “The Queen, my Lord, is dead.” “She should have died hereafter.”

MAKING MERIT “There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” And riding on that apophthegm, to lower worlds they go until the pain compresses them and makes them scream out, “No!” There is some truth in points of view, that what seems good to me might not seem so to you; but can you say that how you see affects the way a thing may be? “Good” actions do not depend on the viewpoint you happen to select, but on what you intend and whether it produces good effect. No matter what the label may be, by its fruit we judge the tree. 125

TRUTH IN THE BOTANIC GARDENS Thousands of Magnolia flowers, by Danby’s gate and yellowstone walls, test vernal powers against the winds of March; and wait. Slowly, blossoms fall, like heavy snowflakes, one by one, lit by a dull and clouded sun. Tourists have gathered here to see the wonder of this snow-blossom tree and try to stop it slip away with inner eye or photography. Try as they may to seize the glories of this day, tree, branch and twig will rot, the yellowstone wall be broken and decayed; Earl Danby’s name will be forgot – his gate demolished, scrapped and weighed. The photographs themselves will fade. And, as the months and years slide by, what of the harvest of that “inner eye”? Even those mind-made facsimiles will be lost in old age’s imbecilities.

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OWN GOAL Cast up on a desert island, hut to be erected, food to be found. Making something I can call â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;my landâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to protect and be protected on my own ground. Another somewhere to be hot and cold in. A here (or there) to be young (grow old) in. Another invitation to play Now or Never (and earn consolation for Honest Endeavour). Another attempt to eat Pie in the Sky (and hear their contempt as the Seagulls float by). With sweat and grunts the Cosmic Mole digs ever deep-wards to his Own Goal. And when he makes it to his brand new lair he finds his footprints are already There!

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HE THAT HATH EARS, LET HIM HEAR The buzzing screen in the brain masks the ubiquitous and transeternal pain. Voices drifting on the winds of space, leaves from the Tree of Time; telling the Seasons, warning of disasters to come, (or already here), of evil lapping at the threshold, of the omnipresent worm, of the spider spinning his web in the palaces of Kings.

HOW MANY ANGELS CAN STAND ON THE POINT OF A PIN? Although the Two Worlds are so intimately linked, how is it that they are completely distinct? See! A ten-ton elephant and a thousand soldiers reflected in a single mirror! Why doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the glass shatter under the weight of such an elephant? Why does not the frame splinter beneath the boots of such an army?

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TREASURES ON EARTH, TREASURES IN HEAVEN The scent of the rose fades in the dry air and the roses themselves shrivel and fall. The Rose Garden too succumbs to the developer and his high-rise flats which brush against the sky. Red bricks give way to changing architectural fashion or a motorway or a bomb. And as the polar ice melts the sea slips slowly in with its colonies of fish and crustaceans that slide and crawl in and out the ruins. The very earth perishes by fire or, growing dry, it hurtles through space like a rock thrown by a giant, to crash against another and shatter into intercosmic fragments. When God himself comes to visit his â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;world without endâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, he finds a rapidly dispersing cloud of dust. Returning to his heaven, his throne grows cool and he too falls into the ebb and flow of becoming. Do not let your heart cling to what you cannot take with you to what you cannot take with you to what you cannot take with you. What can you take with you? 129

JUDGE NOT, THAT YE BE NOT JUDGED Long Wig up on his High Chair stares at Long Hair standing there below him in the dock. ‘I cannot deviate from the Law,’ he says, glancing at the clock. ‘This is my decision. Six months without remission. Oh, and yes, with hard labour.’ ‘Decision’ ‘Remission’ ‘Hard Labour’ rang the echoes round the court as each man turned to scrutinise his neighbour. The Judge retired. To dinners with people of the better sort. To bottles and bottles of vintage port. To a Knighthood and, well, to cut it short, to the Daily Telegraph. On a day when, to his great surprise, he saw his own obituary spread out before his eyes. ‘Someone,’ he said, ‘has done this for a laugh!’ intending to berate the Daily Telegraph. The phone he found he could not lift. Arms and legs he could not shift. Eyes stayed fixed within their sockets. Hands were clenched within his pockets. The world went spinning through empty space as Long Wig sank to a dark, dark place. Yama, enormous, long-haired and grim, turned his all-seeing eye on him. ‘I cannot deviate from the Law. This is my decision. Six hundred years without remission. Oh, and yes, with hard labour.’

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TRAVEL LIGHT The Mouse that scuttles down the bank across the bricks and back again, carries no wallet and all its baggage is in the simplicity of its brain. The Bird that slides across the wind has left its briefcase in a former life, together with its house its mortgage (and its wife). The Beetle with antlers like a stagâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s needs no loan, pays no tax and lives inside its bone. Only Man has spread his thought far and wide; is caught in its pulsating web, and, grasping every thread, is trapped inside.

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WALK ON Walking On is not just a matter of feet measuring out the streets of this world; or the clatter of railway tracks dwindling to a point in the far-off, backward-looking, which has now become the past. Nor is it the Ocean Liner slipping out of port, pushing through waves which break and form again in its wake and become the past. Nor is it Heathrow packed with little pockets of human misery; its loudspeakers calling this one, telling that one where to go whom to contact; sending its iron birds buzzing through the Void. Nor moving sand filling the footprints of the beachcomber. It is not the Divorce Court apportioning the family property, its houses and wardrobes, bank accounts and children; everything divided, neatly, into two. 132

It is not the New Yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Resolution, the half-effort, half-prayer of one who finds himself at rock-bottom, needing a new solution, (sensing the rocks giving way beneath him). It is the cleansing of the Heart with the tears of letting go what is now too heavy to possess. It is the cleansing of the Mind with the light of understanding, chasing out shadows it is no longer necessary to repress. It is the cleansing of Conscience seeing what is obvious, giving it the courage to confess. It is the cleansing of the Spirit which identifies itself with absolutely nothing (and nothing less!).

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THE RUDDER A smoking cloud of thoughts blots out the sun; swirls in ever-changing imaginative shapes. Vast and pervasive it billows throughout space. What is this phantasmagoria? Tiny specks of soot. While this is still our daily bread from the ovens of our senses, we have not yet gone beyond. Stumbling in this darkness; fuelled by earthly fires. What rudder? In whose hand? Put out the fire; and then put out the fire that burns beneath this funeral pyre.

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RIGHT VIEW In the Jungle of the World and the Tangle of the Senses we build us huts of mud and heartache and make (and mend) our fragile fences. ‘This is me! That is mine!’ is the burden of our song. We cannot see, still less define that pain and sorrow prove us wrong. This is not mine, this is not me, is the beginning of our sanity. Letting go of what does not concern us leaves that alone which, meddled with, will burn us. The Law is mirror-like in its precision and its simplicity needs no revision; that Good breeds Good and Evil has its price; that Virtue is its own reward. And so is Vice. That all things pass away, from butterflies to stars, and though the World’s a prison it’s the Mind that makes the bars.

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OLD WOUNDS The landscape itself is cracked and pitted. Quarries gouged out of the rock face. Concrete jungles where forests grew. A million species drowned by hydro-electric schemes. Roman grain bowls becoming the Sahara desert. And the figures that pass through this landscape, four-footed, two, or none with scar of tooth and claw of virus, germ and epidemic. With facsimiles of torture, rape and death stored in a kaleidoscopic heap beneath the not-entirely-undisturbed surface of the mind. “Forgive and forget,” says Prospero. “Vengeance is Mine,” saith the Lord, “I will repay.” “Shantih, shantih, shantih,” sings the Upanishad. “There is this one way…” begins the Blessed One.

NO PROJECT Holding a candle to drawn curtains, shielding tired eyes against the Sun, almost, but not quite, now half-certain that one and one and one is one!

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PEACE You can kick a stone lion as often as you like. Though it will hurt your foot, you can never persuade it to bite you. Everyman his own prison makes and keeps his peace at bay.

METTÄ&#x20AC; The Sun shines. All the Asuras hide in caves and holes in the ground. Mind shines. The syllogists and their systems collapse like towers of matchsticks into a heap of kindling. MettÄ shines. The cancerous growths which cling to the living cells of the children of Light shrivel into powdery dust. 137

BHAVANĀ The great gates hang on broken hinges, the temples blaze, the walls are breached; the palaces have all been looted the end of a dynasty has been reached. Those still living have all been taken, women and children have been sold; the last king hangs from the palace lintel, the images burn to give up their gold. Think, when you dream of country houses, of shattered rafters and sudden fear; and, as you climb the social ladder, remember the last king hanging here.

MINDFULNESS Blondin above Niagara, the rope begins to sway. The rocks below are grinning. Every step is Judgement Day. Hermit in the forest, the mind begins to play. Māra’s hosts are grinning. Every thought is Judgement Day.

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SELF-DISCIPLINE Sitting quite still and with Nothing to hold on to. While the planet on which you sit (a kind of ball, flattened at both ends) is spinning at a fair old rate of knots. And rolling all the while in a great circuit round a vast, exploding Ball of Fire. Sitting quite still (and with Nothing to hold on to). It takes a lot of self-discipline to say, “How do you do? And your family? And your dog?” and wonder, “Will it rain tomorrow? “Will the Stock Market continue to fall? “Might it be a good idea to grow asparagus this year?” (After, say, another forty-four circumnavigations of the Ball of Fire?) Assuming, of course that we don’t fall off and the Ball of Fire doesn’t suddenly go cold and freeze us all to death. A great deal of self-discipline indeed I assure you is needed. 139

PURIFY THE MIND From Mt. Kailas, birthplace of Shiva, Lord of All, the snow slides down the Himalayas melting into pure water and becomes Ganga the holiest of rivers. Absorbing the works of nature and of man, it flows past temples, villages, rice fields, factories, Calcutta slums, and becomes, at last, the sea in the Bay of Bengal. On its way it purifies the faithful, accepts the bodies of the dead and funeral relics, washes elephants, infuses tea; and harbours cholera and an influx of chemicals and sewage. As a carrier it is a vehicle of Life. According to its contents, it sustains or kills.

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THE SCIENCE OF ADEQUATE CAUSES Trace it all back as far as you can from where it is now to where it began. From knife to hand from hand to eye; from footprints on sand to sun in the sky. Trace it back further to where it begins to the gateways and windows where all things get in. The scent is not the rose but the hairs that line the nose. The seascape is the roving eye, the tongue is the taste not the apple pie. Mozart is what you hear and his place is in the ear. And all the subtle sensations that impinge upon the skin flare their little on/off switches in the mind that shines within.

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GET UNSTUCK Leaves from the Tree of Life; brown and withered, dried with growing old, dislodged by the touch of Time; or green, with veins still swelling with rising sap, torn free by an untimely wind. What are they, these dancing treasures? The more the tree creates, pushing and budding out of reaching, branching fingers, the more they spiral down and spin and congregate like giant midges in every gust and eddy. What are they, these dancing treasures separating from the Tree of Life? Thoughts. Thoughts. Thoughts. Each contains in its form the whole tree. Each contains in its form nothing the denuded tree cannot do without. Spiralling, spinning, congregating, they clog drains and streams and waterways; make paths treacherous. 142

Good for nothing but rotting down and feeding the insatiable hunger, the thousand breathing mouths of the sangsāra!

THE PERFECT TEAM NEEDS PERFECT PLAYERS The boy broke the old man’s window. He said he felt fine and still loved the old man. The old man broke the boy’s window. He wanted to show him the view, and how the lawn led on to the trees and, high above, the empyrean blue. The boy was allergic to draughts and the glass had kept them out, and though he knew that there was a view he had no need to know what about.

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SILENCE Opium heals, applying a chemical bellows to the Vital Heat; a golden silence. At what cost! Matchstick limbs out of Auschwitz, fever-bright eyes. Such sweet poison! Music heals, early music; Greek Olympian music. Clusters of notes with open phrasing dancing on the surface of the Void and tumbling endlessly in, leaving no trace. The unmatchable healer is Silence itself. Into it everything subsides; half-formed phrases, the concatenation of thought, the sword-play of tongues. All vanish like snowflakes in a raging furnace. He who has found the silence, which lies behind sound, as the sky lies behind planet, star and cosmic dust, he does not pursue the clatter of sound.

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SHANGHAI JAR Standing in a Shanghai Jar water trickles down my nose debris falls upon my head mud builds up around my toes. My clothes are sodden, caked with mould, water splashes round my knees. The air is misty damp and cold, I cough and splutter, wheeze and sneeze. What am I doing in this zone holed up in this dreadful pot? This is my own, my very own, though why or how I have forgot. Outside, the sun spins through the heavens. The stars, like gold dust, fill up space. The cosmic wind slides through the void. Somewhere, out there, my own true face?

HOW OLD ARE YOU? I saw a bone upon the beach. That bone, I thought, has much to teach. “How old, old bone,” I asked, “am I?” “Old?” said the bone. “Old enough to die!”

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I, ME, MINE In the Beginning (or perhaps a little later) there was I. And then, because I was lonely, there was me. And we got on like a house on fire! And, so that we could have something in common, there was mine. And we got on like a house on fire. (Very much like a house on fire!) And then you came along and spoilt everything because you wanted yours; and what you called yours was actually mine. And to make matters worse, you brought him with you; and he wanted his. And although he could have shared yours, he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t. He wanted it all to himself. And he wanted mine. And so it all went wrong. There was the Spanish Armada and the French Revolution and the Second World War and Vietnam and Tony Blair and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all such a mess! And yet, it started out so well!

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BETHANY In the grey mist of an English dawn, the starling stamps and prods and probes and generally disturbs the lawn, seeking to confirm an English proverb. Beneath the green of an English lawn, the patient worm catches the bird. In this numbing cosmic dance, each one gives and takes his chance to feel and find in flesh and mind the ambiguous secrets of becoming.

SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI The splendour of a hundred kings fades like the bloom on a butterfly’s wings. The meanest flower that blows goes the same way the forest goes. All is consumed by worm or fire; nothing needs building any higher. The rattling of teeth within the jaw mocks the tongue murmuring: “Please, some more!”

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EDMUND GOSSE: FATHER AND SON (Eternity and the Productions of Time) Gosse & Son (Ltd) were, it now seems, Eminent Purveyors of Humanity’s dreams; Latter–Day Saints by their own admissions; (latter–day guardians of discredited traditions). Like pilgrims in the Seventh Seal (like all who find not till they feel), they spurn the fruit of life and choose the peel and dance, grotesquely, up Zion’s hill (that strange perversion of the human will). (Each man his own prison makes and ends up owing what he takes.) Plundering Devonshire rock pools of all the hostages they can, stripping “the meat” off skeletons, “to justify the works of God to Man”! (Each man his own prison takes and ends up owning what he makes.) Sitting in their own museum, microscope in hand, catalogue on knee; cased butterflies making a mausoleum of glass and polished mahogany. Did those aërial dancers take their last flight out of dappled shade and sunlight in an act of spontaneity with the free will given by their deity? Or did they come via net and cyanide jar, with japanned pin stuck through each chest, to stand, wings dried and stretched apart, silent, by its label, with the rest? Gosse Père, quasi scientist and would-be sage, talks of Saving Grace and Divine Covenants. 148

He has a Jewish book of dubious provenance that he has learned to learn by heart page by page; and takes upon himself the leading part on his own stage. He shapes himself to be his version of Jehovah’s Law, expecting his reward – the Light for evermore! Gosse Fils remembers the pain and humiliation of a solitary beating. (He conveniently forgets what he did to deserve it.) He sees the moving shadow of his conscience retreating and a double identity with which to observe it. Now he opens myopic eyes to a brave new natural history; hastens to make himself more worldly wise in a less academic mystery; eagerly unlearns his father’s creeds and follows where Algernon Swinbourne leads! Their lives, their loves, their wallpaper, damp with that sour spiritual vapour of those in the human formicarium who hide their Pentecostal fire in the waters of their aquarium. (Is not the labourer worth his hire?) Their specimens both maritime and literary are fossils which embalm their mutual history. Father: “You are sailing down the rapid tide towards Eternity without an authoritative guide!” Son: “I took a human being’s privilege and pride to fashion my inner life for Myself!” 149

HARROW 1962 – 2002 “Forty years on when afar and asunder Parted are those who are singing today….” Today? Today on Harrow Hill shirt-sleeved students come and go talking of tennis (and Malvolio). “Visions of Boyhood shall float them before you…” How far is it from here to there? In space? In Time? In memory? In the churchyard among the autumn foliage, the Peachey Stone, still stands four hundred feet above the plain. Though Byron’s “drooping elm” has gone. “Here might I sleep, where all my hopes arose…” Today, no poet reclines or writes his lines upon the Peachey now. It is protected by an iron cage to keep the outside out. Nor is Lord Byron buried here “wrapped by the soil that veils the spot I loved.”

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Dying in Missolonghi, his earthly part went back to Newstead (though without his heart). Behind the Peachey, St Mary’s, Archbishop Anselm’s consecration, still waits its transmutation to higher, less substantial realms. “Forty years on, growing older and older, shorter in wind as in memory long…” Greenhill Road has grown demotic, with trees cut down and access changed, and all the streets around are different; strange, chaotic, rearranged. At forty-one still stand hydrangeas; same brass knocker and blue front door. Though now it all belongs to strangers. (We do not live there anymore.) “Visions of boyhood….. Echoes of Dreamland….”

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NĀMA AND RŪPA They put him on the table; the surgeon’s coat was white. “First we’ll cut off your left foot. Then we’ll cut off the right.” “Now just a minute!” cried Wu-kih, “You can’t do that to me! Cutting off my feet, you see, Will cause me agony!” “No problem,” said the white coat, “There won’t be any pain. We’ll give you an injection which will detach your brain.” “It’s not the foot that hurts, you see, the pain is in the brain.” And though Wu-kih did not agree, his protests were in vain. They stuck a needle in his butt, ignored his pleas and moans. And with a nice, sharp saw they cut right through his ankle-bones. Wu-kih watched in yellow fright. White coat began to sing. And yet white coat had been right - he did not feel a thing! Not then. But as the drug ran out, it was replaced by pain. And Wu-kih gave a fearful shout, “My brain’s come back again!”

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THE WORSE, THE BETTER Lying on a bed of nails, young Wu-kih finds this never fails to assist him in his aspiration to be a yogi who can rise to the occasion. He started out a yogic loafer with drawing pins upon his sofa but though, at first, his flesh would creep he always ended up asleep. Standing on his head, he heard, would make him soar just like a bird. But when he tried to fly, he found he plummeted and hit the ground! But now he finds he cannot slack with sharp, wire nails in his back. With ease, he rises from his siesta And worse, he now maintains, is best-a.

THE UNQUIET DEAD The Unquiet Dead seek their Peace on the ever-spinning Wheel, within a world where they just lease the small part they can see and feel. And what they see and feel still grieves them. And what they think is real deceives them. Although the Suffering is real. Although the Suffering is real.

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ONE ARROW, TWO ARROWS Why should the hand complain for the glove abandoned in the rain? Why should the foot retain the ragged shoe and call it pain? Why should the coloured window pane inflict on the white wall a lasting stain? Why should the nerve-ends’ loss and gain reach any higher than the blood-filled brain? The mind shines down from out of sight casting shadows on membrane but does not leave behind its light or inflict on flesh a precious bane. One arrow splits the skull in twain but seeks to scratch the smile in vain.

LOYALTY Where oaths are demanded for a place in the sun and the labour of many serves the dictates of one; where fast trades are made and fixed deals are done; Loyalty – le loi – is the law of the gun. Where gifts are exchanged and the pure mind leads, the heart with its wisdom SOWS LOYALTY’S SEEDS.

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CHRYSALIS Livingness, held in place, projects the image of a face. The face itself no more form has than moon on water or shade on glass. Yet fathers forth both tears and laughter, a story of before and after, which sports itself upon Life’s waters until the blood–beat rhythm, strangely, falters. Then, tears and laughter, livingness and face stumble here and lose their place. And all things human are here unmanned at the granite doorway into no-man’s land. Say, at this parting of the way where all things hurt you, what have you learned to pray that will not desert you? Here, where you find you are quite deaf and dumb, what home-made lifeboat have you made/become?

NEGLECTED GARDENS Weeds from seeds sown by youthful folly breed (and feed) middle-aged melancholy.

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WATERING WEEDS A column of cocoa encased in a cup waiting for someone to sip it all up. The cup we don’t swallow yet, were it not there, to get at the cocoa we’d be licking the chair. Because of the spoon, the soup travels through space and finds its way safely to a hole in our face. MORAL: Just because it looks non-essential, that doesn’t mean it’s a weed.

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NO NEW PROJECTS Don’t place too much reliance on the label on the tin. Open it and taste what lurks within. (Even the salesman’s lengthy explanation has more to do with sales than information). And when it wags its tail and barks that it’s a cat, well, I wouldn’t place too much confidence in that. Even if it brings its tongue in on a golden platter, the gold is in the plate, the meaning…. another matter.

LONG SNAKE, SHORT LADDER Curled around that massive tree old Satan waiteth patiently; while up above the monkeys play all their lifelong summer’s day. Scrambling up and up they try, to be the first to touch the sky. At the very top, each finds the sky still out of reach, although not out of mind. So with a final upward leap, defying gravitational laws, they tumble headlong, an untidy heap, into old Satan’s yawning jaws!

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VIEWPOINTS At Tha Thua they sweat, eat ice, jump in river. At Whitsands we’re wet, wear coats and just shiver. At noon, garlic toast is a must. Half-an-hour later it tastes just like dust. Our viewpoints change to meet new data as smart clothes adjust to the Fashion Dictator. (And yet the dog with mange seems oblivious to change; is equally ill at ease in hot sun, shade or breeze!) At twenty I run, at sixty rehearse the past, at eighty, well, breathe in my last! (And yet that dog with mange is still oblivious to change; continues ill at ease in shade, hot sun or breeze.) It all comes down to the struggle to survive, the endlessly obstructed urge just to stay alive. All (including dog) use just one rule as measure, avoidance of pain and pursuit of pleasure. Pain leaves an imprint which says, “Leave it be!” The sirens of pleasure leave a note, “Follow me!”

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AN EDUCATED CROCODILE IS STILL A CROCODILE Rabbit with a habit lived in a hole next to Vole. And his habit was his link with the beginning of it all and kept him looking different from his next door neighbour, Vole. So they laid a proper treat on, washed his face and brushed his hair; and they took him off to Eton to be educated there. There, they dressed him in a boater, smart black jacket, white bow-tie; and then they took his photo, just to please his Auntie Vye. And they fed him on cucumbers, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats. And they taught him compound numbers and such-like intellectual treats. He learned to say, “What rot!” And would ask, “How do you do?” So they popped him in a pot, part of a rabbit and rhubarb stew! (MORAL: AN EDUCATED HABIT IS STILL A RABBIT!)

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THE NOTEBOOK AND THE PEN Register the birth. Now register the death. All unfinished business ends with the breath. Ends. But then again begins as we all come back for more. Even though we long forgot what it is we come back for. Only while the breath continues to feed the brain and work the sinews, can we put an end to pain and stop it coming back again. Keep a record of whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s needed to be done (or else undone); to be planted (to be weeded) to be finished (or begun).

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CINDERELLA’S SHOES The ugly sister, Alice, glared at the mirror with reflected malice; gave a grin and blew a bubble; stroked the stubble on her chin and simpered, in unbridled bliss, “What a charmer I iss!” adding, with a grimace, “Who’s the prettier, glass face?” “Cinderella! Cinderella. Cinderella. Cinderella. Cinderella. Cinderella.” The mirror twinkled a little wintry. “Cinderella. Cinderella….” The tiny fragments of splintery glass were swept up by footman Fred. “What a wolatile woman!” Fred said. “A weally, wolatile woman!” An officer guarded the small glass slipper, passport to a prince and palace. (But not for Alice.) She squeezed and pressed and squealed and swore and gave a most almighty roar. More fragments of splintered glass were swept up by footman Fred. “What a woracious woman!” Fred said. “A most woracious woman!” Cinderella slipped easily into the other shoe, was whisked off in a gilded carriage to a brave new world where her goodness drew her, to liveried servants and a royal marriage! 161

And Alice? She stumbled her bloody way to a fate far worse than death. To a tiny cell with walls of mirrors. Unbreakable, bullet-proof, everlasting glass!

WHY DONâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;T YOU WANT TO KNOW? Not knowing is a barrel tumbling over Niagara: darkness within danger without. Knowing is the full moon at midnight splashing light in the darkest corners. Wanting to know is taking responsibility for the good and the bad. Not wanting to know is a skeleton in the cupboard and a bloody knife under the floorboards.

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BUILDING A HOUSE Of building houses there is no end with bricks and feelings, thoughts and mind, using the universal glue that clings and sticks and binds. Lovers spin webs for castles, conquerors ancestral halls, angels their heavenly mansions, demons their prison walls. Actors that tread the boards and actors on the street have studied how to speak their lines and where to put their feet. Each is his own creator and jostles with the crowd, entangled with his own conceits by turns both arrogant and cowed.

STILL LIFE Magnolia petals have fallen from the vase and lie on the carpet. Like great bivalve shells, mauve and parian white, from some pre-Cambrian beach.

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PRETENDERS Let’s pretend, say the children rushing to the beach, building high their castle walls as far as they can reach. Let’s pretend, say their parents lying in the sun, that we’ve just won the lottery and our new Life has begun! Let’s pretend, say the teenagers, that we’re tough guys on the run and steal a beat-up, black Ford Escort and have ourselves some fun. And let’s pretend we’re happy even though we’re not. Look at Uncle Wu-kih sitting in the sun, counting all his blessings one by one by one. Let’s pretend we’re Wu-kih who is only four foot small but believes that, in the whole wide world, there is no-one quite as tall. Let’s pretend that we remember what we only just forgot; that at least we know who’s who though we’re not quite sure what’s what; that we’re getting on all right, though inside we know we’re not: and although we’re getting nowhere, still we do not care a jot.

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“DEGREES WE KNOW UNKNOWN IN DAYS BEFORE, THE LIGHT IS GREATER, HENCE THE SHADOWS MORE” In the search for thornless roses and the perfect apple pie, many a question poses and many reasons why. Seedless grapes are on the plate (though cloudless summers have to wait). They’ll cut your leg off without pain (though Abel still meets brother Cain). There are as yet no snake-less Edens; and the Heathens kill for God (though only the House of Islam does not find this odd). They tattoo your arms with Saxon runes and give you Chinese eyes and blow your breasts up like balloons. And yet, still, everybody dies. The sun shines from the heavens. The shadows fall on earth. It may be, as the Greeks said, “Avoid, at all cost, birth!”

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WHISPERS OF MORTALITY A shrieking cavity in the tooth expounds aloud the Aryan Truth. The tiny corpse beneath the bench encapsulates impermanence. Swollen ankle, creaking knee undermine both “mine” and “me”. The bridge’s double arches span a granite medieval weir. Moans and cries fill the juddering van which drags its cargo to Death and Fear. A young man dangles a lure in front of him in rushing Tavy’s iron-coloured froth, up which the August salmon swim towards their memories of birth. At the church door the black robed priest turns us back. Apologises: “The funeral is nearly over.” His smile is keen. Compromises: “Please come back at 12.15.” Shaun says that Pops is terminally ill, coughing blood in Notting Hill. And Shaun himself is relocating. His Aunt is dead. He’s leaving Flood Street. He’s sold her flat in Cadogan Lane. Now he can pander to itchy feet and wander off to Winchester again. The length of life is one breath, it seems. How many Whispers make a Scream?

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KOH SAMET (FOR SUNTHORN PHU) Every morning at Pineapple Beach ten thousand cicadas sound their trumpets; in the sea-bo trees, in the olive trees, in the ngew trees with their bloodâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;coloured sap and their thorn encrusted trunks (up which adulterers scramble in hell). Every morning ten thousand cicadas sound their trumpets with the rough hiss of oil sizzling in the frying pan of the sky. This morning, ten million came and silenced all their rivals â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the mumbling of the ocean, the drumming of the axe-head birds, the screaming of salika birds with their yellow beaks and magpie jauntiness. Ten million? Not so! Only that Indra had risen early in Chantaburi and loosed a torrent of rain. Tourists, who had paid for the guaranteed sunshine of Paradise, glared blearily at a hissing blanket of rain and mist. Achtung! said Germany. Merde! said France. Whaddyaknow! said America. Shit! said Newcastle. NO! said Wu-kih happily. Not sit! It lain. It leal lain! He made a run for the nearest ngew tree. 167

MĀRA A dry leaf scrapes across dry clay giving Māra’s game away. The clock cuts into hours each day to keep Eternity at bay. Eternity outwaits the clock and Māra’s game is back on track. The master-key clicks shut the lock which stops the clock from turning back. Leaf and clay must meet in dust. (And Māra’s game is back on track.)

A POISONED CHALICE Education breeds expectation. Expectation leads to frustration. Frustration is a suicide bomber. Flowers of the Void are not so easily destroyed. Insubstantial from the start, they shine on in each empty heart.

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FULL MOON DAY THIRD LUNAR MONTH One candle is a light unto itself. One hundred candles illuminate a room. In a room, one candle is a light unto itself. Uposatha day at Wat Katum, seven old ladies and one old man taking eight precepts for a day to keep the Niraya fires at bay. “I undertake to observe the precept to refrain from killing living beings. “I undertake to observe the precept to refrain from taking things not given. “I undertake………” An old monk gives a sermon: “A silent sandoth arahant is blamed. Articulate Sariputta is blamed. Economical speech of Ananda is blamed. Even silent Buddhas cannot escape censure. Criticising others burns the mind, wards off wholesome states of mind.” A new and lofty concrete sala hall is being built to house a replica of a famous Buddha image. In this, they say, Luang Po Sothorn floated, in a miracle,

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along the river Bang Pakhong to Chachoengsao after the sacking of Ayudhaya, a city of a million souls. Eleven o’clock, a bell sounds. Seven monks follow their abbot to walk a hot and dusty concrete road past a rabble of dogs with mange, to Jai Hieng’s house. Sabbe sankhāra dukkha. On the anniversary of Jai Hieng’s father’s death. Sabbe sankhāra anicca. Off the road, concrete lintels laid end to end make a causeway. On the left a lake once watered orchards. The lake remains, abandoned to monsoon and sun and the struggle to survive. The orchards have gone to make way for a ramshackle prison, an intensive chicken farm. A hundred yards of crude, wooden Auschwitz. Deserted now. Last week’s screams and cackles and sudden death are an uneasy silence this hot afternoon. By government decree, the chickens have gone. A thousand and more, stuffed alive into bags, thrown into a pit. 170

A powdering of white lime on freshly dug earth where the tractor has been. A mass grave. To protect humans from chicken flu. In Jai Hiengâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house the monks sit, on coloured rattan mats, along adjacent walls. Fans are trained on them. A white string links them, hand to hand, from abbotâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hand, to Ting Leeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s urn in the adjoining room. They chant of suffering, impermanence and insubstantiality. Two old ladies and one foreigner listen to Pali words spoken by Buddha himself over two and a half thousand years ago. In a chant which vibrates the heart chakra like a lute string. No-one else listens. Food is being prepared. Everyone shouts commands and counter-commands. Plates clatter. Cutlery rattles. Monks chant. 171

They do not need to listen to a language which, like the liturgies of medieval Christendom, is recognised, revered, but, by the laity, not understood. It is enough that the monks are here, large and loud, like a massive, virtual reality Television Screen. Afterwards, lunch. We sit and watch the monks eat. As in Bangkok the rich will pay to watch the king dine. Curries, rice, shrimps, asparagus, carrots, peas, tofu, sticky rice, dom yam, lotus seeds, luk deui, makaam, thets, jackfruit, mangoes. (But no chicken.)

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IN MEMORIAM VLADIMIR ILYCH There are haves and have-nots. The poor are always with us. Sometimes, poverty and suffering provoke a great man and there is a revolution. With much blood shed, much sacrifice, much heroism. Afterwards, the country lies wounded. And there are haves and have-nots. имущие и неимущие

CHANDRA Full moon shines behind clouds of out-of-season rain. The sun edges closer. Deserts return again.

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REQUIEM FOR A PRINCESS MURDERED BY HER GARDENER Blondin walks the tightrope over Niagara, forwards, backwards, blindfolded, on a bicycle, to distant applause among crashing waters. Ten times, twenty, fifty…. One step missed answers the first step taken onto the swaying rope. Then, everything is, as it has always been; jagged rocks and thundering waters. Into the silence where yesterday’s applause cannot reach. Those who inherit the lands of the lotus eaters are not yesterday’s children. The path to the top of the Golden Mountain is the labour of many hands and feet. They could not count the sands of the Ganges. How would we reckon the length of a kalpa? Or the work of hands? Or the pairs of sandals worn through to the dust on such a journey?

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YAMA’S RETINUE The village abounds in dogs. Mangy, thin, crippled, endlessly hungry, fearful and aggressive. At the Elephant Gate of Wat Kratum there are twenty. At Wat Tarsun, they salute the guardian devas changing guard. They greet Luang Po’s voice and his exhortations from beyond the grave (recorded on cassette) four times a day. In the village they fight howl squeal. They growl the First Noble Truth from hundreds of hungry mouths. By day. By night, they bark at every unfamiliar sound; setting each other off like a bush fire jumping from bush to bush until night’s landscape is ablaze with sound. Just before dawn there is a change. It is as though a stone were dropped into a pool and the ripples spread until the whole pool is disturbed.

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Yama and his retinue seem to pass across the land like a gust of wind across a rice-field. All the canine sound transposes to howling and moaning, the overspilling of unsupportable fear. The centre of this vortex of sound, underlying the discordant symphony of pain, is the voice of Hell itself. A howl of evil which is human! Or some subhuman stratum from which humanity springs. Whose voice? In which hut in this village, dwells this being who wakes in the third watch of the night? At whose call?

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HERAKLEITOS I Entendu! Understood! One cannot step into the same river twice. Fresh waters are eternally rushing in. Who passed this way? And when? Wait! Pond river ocean all are filled with eternal waters. In tasting these, is Liberation not found? And yet the ancient Dragon sits in a dried-out rock pool singing for rain! She has burned her loverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s letters. Will her loverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tears suffice? And the river is jealous, resentful of bridges, imprisoned in pipes and drainage systems. Even Neptune rages with his trident against the volcano slyly plotting under the seabed; impotently chokes with pollution, hungry and overfished.

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The gods themselves have traded eternity for the ticking of a cosmic clock which crawls its way towards the end of the kalpa. For an alms bowl of memories.

HERAKLEITOS II Who dances not knows not what is done. Even Indra turns his back upon the sun. The many lose their hunger in the fullness of the One. The One loses oneness in the hunger of the many.

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ASHMOLEAN: ΤΕΧΝΗ ΜΊΜΕΤΊΚΗ No Greek fire smoulders in the belly of old Adonis Centocelle, as schoolgirls pass in navy blazers with paper, pencils and erasers. To transpose his dusty marble broken arrow and fragmented bow into the neat pages of each portfolio. There he joins candelabra from Hadrian’s villa, a sketch of Goethe’s head and one of Schiller. And though he seems to stare out through blank eyes, no tremor of erectile tissue can arise in that drooping cigar stub between his thighs.

TAIL OF A TYPHOON Whirling round the gulf of Thailand tugging at the coasts and high land blowing red dust at the sky to choke the nose and sting the eye then rain to wash it teeming down and turn the streaming river brown with silver trails where boats have passed. Now, quite blown out and still at last.

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GUIDE BOOK “In Chiangmai there are many shapeful chedis in which nowhere can be seen.” Is stillness something or is it merely what’s left over when things disappear? How can things which are ever-moving, ever-changing, not be? Stillness is complete and perfect when boundaries disappear. Cattle do not feel the farmyard gate pressing against their outward-going faces. The goat does not feel the rope tugging like the endless past at its throat. The bird does not break its wing against the window pane. The butterfly does not struggle into immobility in the tangles of the spider’s web.

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The ear ceases to vibrate, the skin to be the terminus of an electric field. The eye is not stabbed by arrows of fire. When the sea is a millpond, a mirror to the sky above, a darkened window to hazy depths below, and the air is palpable in its stillness, where have the waves gone?

CITY OF ANGELS Shafting sunbeams, misty eddies, towering, sculpted, shining chedis, thundering traffic, six-lane highways, swampy, shabby, backstreet by-ways, mangoes, sticky rice, dom yams, squeezed into the Mother of all Traffic Jamsâ&#x20AC;Ś..

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HOMO SAPIENS CHRISTMAS 2004 “Plastic flowers, plastic treeses, fan-assisted, cooling breezes; all the snow is cotton wool with chunks of ice to keep it cool. Olé!” Walking about his planet (with his dog) carrying out his inspections, looking at his reflections, blaming the mirrors, talking an endless monologue, strides Homo Sapiens. (Non sapiens, non rationalis sed capax rationis fortasse.) A small man (think of a dinosaur), with big ideas (think of genocide), damp and wormy. He will worship a black stone in Saudi Arabia, seven figure numbers on the Stock Exchange, wafers and wine in Canterbury Cathedral and the memory of Elvis Presley. Heartbreak Hotel. He climbs a mountain to say he has done it, rows the Pacific in preference to the Serpentine, makes a bat a protected species and kills 26.78 million chickens in Pilgrim’s Pride. God, bless him. (Please!) 182

SIC TRANSEUNT TEMPORA Pushing up, amongst rust-brown and green furze, glowing blue from within, Michaelmas daisies (who know nothing of Michael – nor his mass). But now, as the earth spins in a darker, colder, windier orbit, their leaves are brittle-green, or hang like red spears waiting to fall and take their place in next year’s compost. Dry flower-heads shrink in on themselves. Like old men, in extra large overcoats tensing into scarves and turned-up collars, to keep in their little warmth. These too wait to take their place in next year’s bonfire. I remember the closing sequences of the Seventh Seal: men and women, caught in a maze of interdependence, led away in a disjointed dance by Death. Only two escaped: one, a visionary of little sense; the other a woman of sense but little vision.

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BANDS Down on the plains the air is thick with dust and shouting. (Even the animals shout as they are goaded to where they do not want to go from where they do not want to be). All curse and squabble in an unending struggle to grasp or share the little that is left on the plains. Girls, with flowers in their hair, shriek at young men for noticing them (and shriek louder at young men for not noticing them). Higher up, the air is clearer and quieter. There are olive groves and vineyards, orchards and, here and there, a fountain or an ornamental pool. Cypress trees shade white painted villas of politicians, film stars and robber barons. With shutters to keep out the sun. Higher again are the mountains, with their patches of green, amidst shining white, thousands of alpine flowers. And a silence across which zigzag, like cracks in the void, eaglesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; cries and the low, unfinished murmuring of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Lordly Ones who dwell in the hills, in the hollow hills.â&#x20AC;? Here are those who wear garlands of fingers and saints whose bare feet press the snow. 184

How is it, then, that you can say, “It came to mind” or “It didn’t come to mind.”? Have you not heard the oracle, speaking, but not in Time: “By their fruits shall ye know them. By their fruits.”?

CORPSE IN MY ROOM An old machine resting there made of bits and pieces; whatever happened to be spare of water, earth and fire and air. An old machine connected to the mains, switched on, is conscious of its pains. Switched off, inert, it does not know its ending; lies in the dirt, decays and rusts, crumbles to dust, uncomprehending.

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JANUARY 23, 2005 “King’s House. Tuesday. 3.45.” An appointment she will never keep with doctor, therapist, social worker and next of kin who try to keep her spirit in, who are trying to keep her alive. Saturday night from a subsiding peace, too shallow to bring heart’s release, uncoils harshness and anger: at senses that will not cease and will not obey her: at a mind that will always and ever betray her. Nurses in her private room who care for her are now a source of despair for her; gaolers to her living tomb. “Take me home! Can you HEAR me!” (can you hear me?) “Take me home! Now!” She wanted us to put her outside in her nightdress. At three in the morning! Said she would get a taxi home! Home? “For man goeth to his long home and the mourners go about the streets”? No. Home to Laurel Court Housing Association. 186

A flat with a front door to keep locked; a familiar bed to rest the ancient of days in her head. “Don’t let the bedclothes touch that wall! A spider sometimes climbs that wall.” No. Instead she lay in a Nursing Home bed while passions pounded and drifted away; by her last possessions so inwardly surrounded; her thoughts, her images, her obsessions; ripening of deeds that will not spare her, for which her preparations did not prepare her. Anger flared her among cooling ashes, flickered along tired nerves its spasms. Quite suddenly, after ninety-one years of holding on to each and everything every day, her grasp let go, breathed out and slipped away. Ten to six. Sunday morning. As the country digested a severe weather warning of black ice and blizzards and widespread snow, 187

she in her last sleep rested and her last journey let her go. Aniccā vata sangkhārā. Aniccā vata sangkhārā. Aniccā vata sangkhārā. Eleven o’clock. One hundred yards from that bed, where a church has stood for seven hundred years, surrounded by the grey stones of its dead, a bell tolls. For whom? The living.

“UNDER THE DARK OF THE VINE VERANDA” Coral dust blows off the white beach onto the slatted table. Overhead, a trellis of brown wood and green leaves and, pushing through, dense clusters of pink and white Ladies’ Finger Nails. Sweet scented with a trace of lime. An orchestra of cicadas, the rustling of a million tiny silver bells. A fine sprinkling sound. Like frost. 188

FEBRUARY 23 MERCURII DIES Walking in Oxford snow among the living and the dead. Looking from Wheatsheaf Lane across the High to St Mary’s. By the church door the cherry is in bloom, mixing static pink with floating white confetti. Ice floats on Cherwell, drifts towards Isis. Today, Torpids play. “Women’s Division Three starts at two – forty! Women’s Division Three starts at two – forty!” Meanwhile Wadham’s Marshall seems to have gone astray. “Must report immediately!” “Must report immediately!” Lost, I presume, in the snow that drives across Christ Church Meadow. Lost among the living and the dead.

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NEIGHBOURS AT BREAKFAST “I’m not going to fall in love again,” says the thin girl through her cloud of thought, while the ragged ribbon holds her hair and the scarf and glasses hide her pretty face. “When did you last fell?” asks the plump boy. His unintentional malapropism unites the table in an outburst of scorn, breaking her self-induced spell. The ripples reach the table by the fire (“Only Dons & their Guests may Sit Here”). The solitary don, with his long-suffering guest, pauses briefly in his explanation of how the bending of light facilitates the appearance of life and accelerates evolution. He smiles absently at this unexpected appearance of life elsewhere. “When I play hockey,” says the girl with the long nose, swollen at one end “I wear a gum shield that is too small. It really hurts and keeps me focussed.” Here without her hockey stick words do not come easily. Her neighbours’ ears are impatient and there is a permanent (and rather pleasant) resentment about her. 190

A girl with sliding eyes and insinuating feet clatters her shoes as she walks across the table, stepping round the croissants, the marmalade and my fingers, to choose her seat against oak panelling. Small and loosely formed, she murmurs her agreement to everything, adjusting the direction of her opinions as easily as a seagull tacks into the prevailing wind. She stays within the confines of the comfortable. Her indispensable anonymity defines the soloists around her. Reginae Erunt Nutrices Tuae.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;GENTLE SPRINGâ&#x20AC;? IN THE ASHMOLEAN Proserpina. Tombstone marble body, eyes staring straight and beyond. To her left an Orange Tip perches on papaver somniferum. To her right blossoming apple.

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DIAMOND MOUNTAIN Wind blows. Rattles an invocation two thousand years old from bronze temple bells. Brushes a susurrus from ten thousand oak leaves. Draws from their branches the moaning of two hundred year old wood, the dry sound of a long-forgotten oboe. Causes a seventy year old man on a slatted bench to tug the scarf across his chest. Wind drops, slips back into eternal silence of measured decay. Wind undefiled speaking in many voices. Diamond Mountain is one hour high, one hour wide, one hour deep. Every hundred years a small bird comes and rubs its beak. When the whole mountain is quite worn away, the first second of Eternity has passed.

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SIVA Foothills of the Himalayas. How vast and towering, Mount Meru! From that icy, lifeless peak behold the plains and pains of men! Frozen, jagged jewels merely compound his charms and devotees still jostle to be martyred in his arms. One defines oneself by others, cannot be big or small alone and, but for the one that we outgrew, how would we know that we have grown? If my tadpole turns into a frog, how should I complain? And if my soul incarnates as a dog, who will agonise his canine pain?

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NORMAL Pain is in proportion to livingness. The more alive you are, the more it hurts to live. This is normal. The young hurt most but mend quickest. New flesh heals where old flesh withers. Young mind feels pain piercing and deep; often so deep that of itself it heals; a child that cries itself to sleep, cries and forgets in eternal singing. This too is normal. Until clinging enters the heart, laying up the treasure of its tears to be disinterred in later years, repented at unwanted leisure. And this is normal. The prophet said: “I will give you life more abundant.” His shadow added: “And more abundant pain to go with it.” Quite normal. Amidst so much normality the pain is what shines through, making a mere formality of what you think you want to do. Grasping out and feeling pain. Letting go and letting heal again. See where the yellow banner is unfurled: “All is for the Norm in this most normal of all possible worlds.” 194

The Sun (still) shines in a bucket of water and doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get wet.