The Light on the Clouds

Nice Diary - 22 Dec 2011

2011-12-22T22:32:00.000Z

Clancy went to work, I to the Léger museum. Seeing his big crude pictures whilst I am reading nobel psychology laureate Daniel Kahnemann's book 'Thinking fast, thinking slow' put what I wrote yesterday into perspective. Kahnemann talks about our two ways of seeing: the first glance and the considered reflection, which he calls (irritatingly) ‘system 1 and system 2’, but I would prefer to call 'prima facie' & 'second thought'.

What falls into place for me is that Léger and most subsequent 'art lite' is all prima facie stuff. Hunt as you will in Léger's work that isn't anything else: it's all WYSIWYG – and that has been the baseline for everything afterwards: this is art in the age of moving images, if it doesn't hit you at once, forget explanations– the artist has already lost you.

(In auditions you can tell the moment someone walks in the door if they are right for a part: if so the gig is theirs, tho they don’t yet know that, and all they have to do is be an idiot or so incompetent as to talk themselves out of it: contrariwise, you know just as surely if someone is not right and even the most brilliant auditon won't help them get the part. If only someone would explain this to actors how much grief could be avoided!)

In Léger I see the ideas and shapes as being about a clever manipulation of the semiotics of modernism. In his early work you see him trying for a style, but once he has found it the work becomes both more assured but also lazier and cruder, as if he no longer really needed to bother about meanings, because everyone ‘gets’ him – he has become a brand, as we would say today.

By a misfortune returning from Biot to pick up Clancy at the Diacosmie I got funneled onto the Voie Rapide and so was swept away from the banks of the Var where I'd been due to meet her and deposited on the other side of Nice. Luckily one of the Opéra drivers was available to take her home, so I decided to head onto Cimiez for my third attempt at finding the Musée Matisse. There I found what confirmed the thesis I've been evolving here – which is that Matisse was a key figure in what might be called ‘high concept’ art (to borrow a phrase from the film industry when a movie pitch can be summarised within a single breath). The reduction of high art to a single gesture, by stripping away ornament just as the International Style had stript ornament from architecture. From Matisse one can trace the progressive reduction of moral content, ie ‘intentional meaning’ in art. It’s interesting that dealers played off Picasso against Matise between the wars, to the extent that one of Matisse’s earliest collectors sold all his works to ‘get into’ Picasso ahead of the market.

Of course Picasso /Matisse /Léger had a full range of craft skills: but in subsequent generations these have become progressively attenuated until we reached the present position where Tracey Emin is appointed professor of drawing at the RA, no less – & it's far from certain she even knows how to hold a pencil, let alone use it!

Where this comes back to is the issue that if there is no otherness in art, no duende, nothing intangible that the artist is seeking to transmit, then WYSIWYG. There is only prima facie consciousness and no oppositio compensandum as Jung might have said: nothing with the roots that descend beneath the niveau mental, and correspondingly nothing that rises above it.

Nice Diary - 21 Dec 2011

2011-12-21T22:30:00.000Z

I suggested we visit MAMAC (Musée d’art moderne & d’art contemporain) as we went by it and I imagined it would have a café for lunch. The museum is in the rear part of the National Theatre of Nice – a 70s complex built over the river Paillion in a style that can most favourably be described as misplaced optimism. Climbing the stairs to get there was as much as Clancy could manage. We sat in the foyer area and looked at the catalog. With a few exceptions it just looked like the biggest pile of tat imaginable. Seeing the American-inspired pop and post-pop artists they had we both thought simultaneously that future ages will look at this ugly rubbish and think “what were they are on?"

Before leaving Id watched Andrew Graham Dixon's series on modern American art and a thought arose from what he said; namely that most of the guys who 'hit' in the 50s & 60s saw themselves as outsiders. However, so long as they were outsiders they had a relationship with an ‘inside’ against which they were rebelling that anchored them a kind of counter balance – but once they themselves with all the dissidence and alienation were hailed as the true inside then there was no longer anything left to counterbalance their innate negativity or inner rebellious anarchy. So with their betes noires overthrown they themselves were in the position not merely of having all their dreams come true but of foisting those dreams on others – which is the unique privilege of the ‘insider’ in the mainstream. But that was a trap for them and society as a whole: for there was no longer any archetypal criteria of beauty. Their own conception of ‘beauty’ (aesthetically desirable) was an anti-beauty that they traced back to Duchamp, and really only existed as an anti-beauty – for it had within it no ‘sustainable’ aesthetic rooted in human psychological archetypes. But once they and their successors who desired to emulate their success began to believe their own publicity they were trapped in a mythography of ‘anti-beauty’.

Stumblingly, I'm trying to talk about Dharma in the arts – the sense of what we sense as truth or authenticity or vertu about and within an aesthetic experience. It is governed by one’s instinctive response/s to what the Japanese call shibui, the aesthetic of perfect economy, and/or GM Hopkins idea of ‘inscape’ – what irreducibly inherent within a work of art. If I call this ‘beauty as truth’ I don’t in any sense mean mere prettiness, I mean ‘what is primordial within a realised form'. The Sanskrit word satya is useful here, for it is used to denote truth but it literally means ‘what is enduring’. How long a thing persists in human experience is probably the best, if not the only, validation.

Ive always seen The Rake’s Progress as representing a comparable turning point in music, and it can be no accident that its 1951 premiere is roughly contemporaneous with what Dixon was describing in art. IMO The Rake’s Progress ushered in a whole sequence of composers who were misled by Stravinsky's brilliant gestures and surfaces but utterly failed to understand that the operatic medium demands the evocation of archetypal emotions as sine qua non and so English composers such as Goehr, Blake, Maw and others composed a kind of anti-opera which, while it may have been ‘good music’ utterly failed in its raison d’être as Opera. The old magician Stravinsky, like Nick Shadow in TRP, pulled off the emotion trick himself, but /and succeded in seducing a whole generation of composers who followed this false dharma and effectively shunted the whole ‘modern opera’ scene off into an art ghetto – as also happened to jazz.

As I write I have been listening to one of Frank Perry's tracks – a guy who really knows everything there is to know about dharma in music. And then on came Django and Stephane. The way Django keeps the sound live through an almost vocal vibrato is the playing of someone who understands that evoking empathy is 90% of entertainment.

Thought as Mass

2011-11-07T12:32:00.004Z

During the night I had a significant dream – in which I was being interviewed by a couple of journalists in a tiny office crammed with bookshelves. We crowded around a card table which served as a desk. Underneath it there was an awkwardly-shaped box occupying the space where our legs wanted to go.

From this I saw that ideas actually do have mass. This led me to reflect on the relationship between ideas, their generation &/or exposition, and the deevelopment of mass. The ‘mechanism’ by which consciousness us converted into matter is the etherial property of numen – the excitement or ‘magical’ interaction between the stated idea and the response it triggers in others. This in turn is a reflexion of the extent of the probabilities it reflects or expresses in the minds of its audience.

This is most clearly seen in mass market music – whose raison d’être, as the title suggests, is to commodify the articulation by individuals of inchoate feelings arising within the zeitgeist. This process also exemplifies the power of certain ideas to achieve mass. And at the same time illuminates the relationship between intentionality and chance in the reification or concretization of ideas – namely, that ideas arising from predetermined coordinates (ie, traditional ethical or æsthetic perspectives) inherently lack the self-adjusting flexibility to assume dynamic coherence within the greater volatility of transient experience/s offered by today’s electronically-enhanced world.

Franz Liszt as teacher

2011-11-03T18:39:00.002Z

In general, Liszt was over-indulgent, above all with female students. His kindness and his severity were expressed according to a special system that not all knew. When he saw that a pupil had absolutely no talent, he waived his right to correct the player, because, in truth, it served nothing. He began then to speak French – a bad sign that caused smiles among the initiated. When a female pupil finished her lesson and offered her forehead in order to receive the obligatory kiss if he commented "Trés bien" in a serious voice, she would leave radiantly, but the inner circle knew that the master spoke ironically.

Memoir by José Vianna da Motta

'The Fear'

2011-09-25T13:17:00.000Z

Recently I finished uploading the last of my second dozen of Bach's 48 Preludes & Fugues which comprise Das Wohltemperierte Clavier. To me it's one of the great holy books of music & I know no better way of starting the day than playing one or two of them. In another two years(?) I hope to complete my project of recording the entire set.
    I started to think of recording them 3 years ago as I've played these pieces informally all my life (my copies are 50 years old next year!) but at that point I saw the colossal gulf that separates playing for personal re-creation & the rigours of recording - where you encounter all your short-comings in pretty brutal close-up!

    I believe that teachers should be forced to perform because it helps them to remain in touch with 'the fear'. From the comfort of a teacher's chair it's all too easy to forget this; and thus to lose contact with the core experience of a young learner.
    By 'fear' I mean the sense of uncertainty /anxiety that discovery of a new world always involves. If people wonder why teenagers become so bolshy, may not a lot be to do with the fact that they're herded like cattle throu all sorts of experiences they're not given time to assimilate, by an industrialised process of education that allows no variation for individual need/s?
    In music you see the downside of the current obsession with exam-mania & winning competitions at ever younger ages in the rising epidemic of stage fright which brings the hopes far too many high-fliers to a bitter end.
    My system of using performances for motivation rather than exams is based on the belief that children benefit from developing a positive relationship with this 'fear'. In other words, of learning to respect 'the fear' & harnessing it, instead of just dismissing it so that it recurs in aberrant way. This means creating an environment where it's OK to fail - people gain the courage to jump higher if it doesn’t hurt to fall.
    I've said elsewhere that I hold the educational system's drive to colonise & formulate every aspect of learning responsible for punk & the manifestations of underground music. If you were a young person confronted by people who were attempting to control & examine every aspect of an activity like music - which is pointless if not pleasurable - why would you not invent an anti-music that teachers & adults couldn’t 'invade & rule' as your own kind of tribal identity for oppressed youth?
    IMO teenagers need music as a 'rumpus room' where they can experiment with the subtle feelings it has the power to evoke, and become comfortable with the immense range of experiences it offers, at a pace and in a musical language they can relate to and, to a degree, control.
   That, even on paper, is likely to produce better balanced adults than the current system where those who can adapt to being pulled backwards throu hedges are given prizes and everyonelse has to fight their way past the thorns as best they may.

    After nearly 15 years of empirical experimentation with what leads youngsters to enjoy & gain value from piano my observation is that concerts provide youngsters with a controlable amount of 'fear', surmounting which builds their self-esteem, so encouraging an optimal learning pattern - which the young pianist can take as far & as fast as s/he wants. I take as much pleasure from the ex-pupil who is now a Porsche mechanic and, according to his mother, still plays (whose uTube 2006 video of Einaudi has now received 24,750 hits!) as the two who are now professional musicians.
    Don’t exams also do this? Maybe & no. Whatever you encounter within yourself in a performance motivated by communicating with an audience (& our parents are the only audience that ever really matters to us) is truly your own & remains with you. It is a nascent version the self-awareness you get from 'battle conditions', with the benefit that in an environment nurtured by a parental response you acquire confidence to extend your comfort zone. In exams you reach you peak nervous excitement by going into a room with a stranger in order to be judged. I just don’t think that is the experience that music exists for - & if you want to know what's at the heart of the central problem of why so many young learners just give up and the more ambitious suffer from nerves, then this partly explains it. And it also explains why so many young musicians have a kind of nervous breakdown after leaving college adapting to a world where the structures offered by this kind 'cruel cradling' fall away & they have to construct their own raisons d’être from scratch.
    In any education system worth the name, its ultimate purpose should be to encourage pupils to be present in their own learning process. The bigger issues are of course much more complex, but this underlying simplicity is often lost sight of; and I feel that it lies within the power of the arts to keep it alive when often elsewhere it is crushed by the dynamics of political control.
    (I should clarify that I don’t oppose all musical exams, I just don’t think they're relevant for most people in the early stages. I was interested to learn that as a general policy Eton no longer enters instrumentalists into the exams below Grade 5. This is the first institution I've heard of taking such an enlightened approach.)
    So my way of keeping in touch with the creative uncertainties which my pupils necessarily experience is by such projects as recording Bach. Keeping such timeless beauty alive for its own sake is also how cultural memory is preserved.

Four Poems

2011-09-13T08:04:00.000Z

Where you belong
may be a thousand miles away
or a millimetre.

The journey there
takes an instant
or a lifetime –

With the password allow
it’s short and tough:
without it, tough and endless.

Certain things cannot be said.

Certain things are.

Discovering silences within the babble

is like viewing the whole valley from a tower.

I see people
who have all life’s possesssions
yet know nothing.

Having nothing
yet possessing the pearl
I know which I prefer.

I battle to be heard;
yet to tell the truth
is to be heard.
Not yet, but forever.

Lakshmi

2011-07-06T10:34:00.000Z

Our Labrador died on Monday at the ripe old age of 16. I was struck by how Clancy & I acted to suppress the great emotions aroused by the death of a much-loved friend with a 'keep calm & carry on' response. She was, as Clancy said, one of the truly good people who brought blessings into the lives of all who knew her.
But this experience made me think how rare death and incurable illness are these days, and how we've built up such protections against what 'undermines' our conscious control of our lives. When you couple that with the fact that so many one-time miracles are now part of everyday life, it's very hard for people to find numen or 'true magic' in their lives. Possibly the only easily-accessed route is sex, but the problem is that if you overload that with expectations you often bury the very thing you're hoping to find.

Rock of Ages

2011-06-22T09:30:00.002Z

My composition starts as a private engagement, an act of listening to the otherness within, a kind of peering into the darkness /silence to encounter what might be there apart from one's own ego. Of course, objectively, there is nothing 'there' - for it is all within you: but subjectively one is looking for or responding to subconscious ideas, inklings, that have some kind of hook to them, like the end of a riddle of string that one can grasp and slowly tease out. It is then pure chance whether one can keep that original emotional reality alive during the time it takes to unravel the knot into a single piece of string. The demands of everyday life can bring distractions that sever one's connexion to the original emotional reality and cause one literally to lose the thread: tho paradoxically it can work the other way, for if the distractions are destructive, fighting (/surrendering) to retain an inviolate inner world can nourish both.

Some composers are fortunate: paid commissions and royalties buy time. But I have neither, and from experience of the way my subconscious works it seems that substantive ideas don’t come to me until I'm overloaded with obligations: THEN my psyche adds a straw to the burden which feels like my 'next step' that is imperative that I honour if more are to follow (in other words it's my Live Channel) even if this involves the wrestling of a 25th hour from the day.

For most people ideas come in response to their social milieu. But that is never how it's been for me. When I first became conscious of having an autonomous inner world when I was about 13 (I see now it had begun about 4 years earlier with disturbing dreams) I had no idea that everyonelse didn’t. Gradually it dawned on me that I was immersed in an educational system that had only one purpose: not to encourage personal discovery but to manufacture conformity. My failure to find a composition teacher then or subsequently has meant that I had to evolve into the kind of teacher I needed to find, but couldn’t manifest. This process has a) taken all my life & b) involved so many blind alleys filled with broken glass, so many seductions by the lazy blandishments of normality or cheap acceptance, so much weighing of honour with need, and so much sheer lostness that I've learnt to function as a sociopath.

After 25 years of furiously refusing to fit into anyonelse's box I realised I was never going to capture the castle from outside. By my social deviation the front door was permanently barred to me: but who needs front doors when you're a sociopath & can just as easily enter by a rear window? So I spent the next 25 observing & copying 'normal' people (with the cover offered by the supreme grace of a loving wife & family). At first I had no rapport with my inner world, and what little understanding I did have came throu my involvement with evangelical Christianity. Whereas in professional music my versatility was viewed with suspicion, in drama it was greeted with open arms: in 1976 alone I had 34 drama commissions, and I loved the technical challenges of broadcast music.

After about 10 years, what triggered a change was awaiting my turn to edit a commercial at Moving Picture Company. Behind the smoked glass of each cubicle the cream of Britain's film-making talent were all involved in fine tuning ecstatic hymns to consumerism. I thought: humanity has created the greatest information medium of all time & all the smart money is on prostituting it in order to corrupt people for profit. I as much as anyonelse was involved because I couldn’t make anything else work for me; but OTOH I knew by then that what I had been given was, if not unique, at least rare: and none of what I was then doing was bringing me closer to what was authentic to the inner world I occasionally glimpsed.

It was not longer after, 12 Dec 1989 to be precise, that I had an overwhelming dream which empowered me to take the first tottering steps towards walking off the edge of that world. I rationalised the hazard to which I was exposing my family by my feeling that I was useless to them as much as anyonelse unless I could discover who I truly was. The dream involved the classic alchemical symbol of the midnight sun, a blazing numinous darkness, in which I was given the name of Sai Baba. It, & he when I discovered who he was, gave me light that guided me in a dark period that lasted nearly 20 years. Gradually in that dark wilderness (tho I always had dreams & schemes that generally failed) little nuggets of gold began to cohere; little clusters of gases that swirled around in my mind, slowly giving rise to solid matter: some formed into coherent ideas, some evaporated. One of the first of the former was what I now call Canticle 1, Easter Dawn in 2004.

Easter is always a spontaneously significant time in my inner calendar. Nearly all my big changes seem to crystalise around that time. If I imagined that this piece would easily find an audience, I couldnt've been more wrong! Gradually I became aware that just as I had had to find my-self without a teacher so I would have to validate my inner hearing without the 'luxury' of outer hearing. (This is somewhat akin to learning to love yourself without a partner: tough, but it can be done.)

Whereas I couldn’t do much about making my choral music heard, because it's too difficult for amateurs & I can't command professional resources; when I'd composed Fortress of Illusion in 2009, after an epic battle with my 'Nessies', my personal demons of lostness, hopelessness & pointlessness, I realised that here at least I could endeavour to give my child a voice. When composing, if Id thought of my own limited pianistic abilities Id've self-censored what I wrote. And the final result was so far beyond what Id ever tackled that learning it took me a year (it took my final duo partner just 10 days, but that's the difference between our skill levels!). I imagine many composers find the journey from a work's silent & eternal perfection in their mind to its squawking imperfections during preparation & real-isation involves both exciting and painful experiences.

Prophets has yet to make that journey, and I don’t know if it ever will. But that’s cool. What is important to me is to improve my inner hearing and amanuensiary capacities. Here is where I stand before that inner otherness (that some people choose, and other people choose not, to call God) in a meaningful relationship in which I both hear and feel heard. And from this, as slowly as water drips from rock, emerge these little piddles of spring water. This nourishes me, regardless of what it does for anyonelse, and that reflects how karma works: we are only required to do what is constructive, then leave the outcome open.

Sonnet: Seasons

2011-06-16T20:30:00.001Z

So great to have the gift of words return! 
For like virility, it comes unearned, 
indeed if sought more likely stays away 
leading to greater alienation. Pray
tho you may, or pay what you will, 
when winter comes you must endure until 
your spring returns.
While summer is less than half
the year, we still expect a sunny life path
all year long; and quickly run for pills 
when autumn mists enfold us with their ills. 
Each winter tries what use we make of sun: 
whether we nurture gifts, or allow fun
to seduce our better selves with pointless thrills. 
A harvest rich in words … or unmet bills?

Sonnet: Pœtry

2011-06-15T20:27:00.002Z

Pœtry is a season of the soul, 
elusive as the autumn mist; whose role 
is in contrast to the summer heat 
when all is out of doors and plain to see –

and so for me tonight as words return 
unexpectedly. From which I learn
my soul’s once more in reflective mood
after nine months’ stürm und drang, with time for soul food

and relaxation after work well done. 
Time now for pause and thought and new beginnings,
a time to listen more than speak; once more  
to go within, and start anew to explore 
being not doing, heedless of gaining and winning … 
re-formed from many atoms into one.

Brhadaranyaka Upanishad

2011-04-25T09:05:00.002Z

Book 4. Chapter 3

2] Yajñavalkya, what is the light which everyone sees? 
The sun, your majesty. By sunlight everyone sees whatever they need.

3] But when the sun has set, Yajñavalkya, what guides them then?
They have the moon your majesty. By moonlight everyone finds what they need to.

4] When both Sun and Moon are covered by clouds, then what guides them? 
Fire. By firelight everyone is led to what they need.

5] And when there is no fire? 
The voice is their guide. Even when you cannot see your own hand before your face, you can still go towards the sound of voices.

6] And if there is no voice? 
One’s inner self becomes one’s light. By it you guide your steps.

7] What is the self, Yajñavalkya?
Among all the senses there is an inner consciousness which consists of intelligent understanding, like a light within the heart: this is the self. A constant presence, this consciousness, which ultimately transcends death, moves freely between the two worlds in sleep, transcending our physical constraints by appearing to contain both the power of thought and movement.

8] At birth this consciousness is formed within temporal reality. At death it relinquishes it.  
9] This consciousness has two states: that of this world and that of the other world. Yet there is also an intermediate state, the twilight world of sleep. From it we see the other two, this world in which we live now, and the other world that is beyond it. Entering the intermediate /dream state we see into the other world and encounter both positive and negative messages.
When you fall asleep, you carry with you all the matter of your waking experience. (But within dream) it is actually your own self which creates and destroys whatever appears. And here the light of your own consciousness is your guide.
10] There are no chariots, no distances, no roads; yet within there appear chariots, distances and roads. There are no joys, no pleasures, no delights (yet you experience them nonetheless). There are no baths, no lotus-pools, no rivers; yet you find baths, lotus-pools and rivers - for your self is the creator.

11] On this there are these verses:
In sleep you sift and blend physical sensations:  
and conscious in the world of dreams you see all.
Like a lonely crane on a long flight you absorb  this pure energy
and so return to your body transformed.
12] Having placed protection around your earthly nest (your sleeping body)  
you are free to soar to the realm of the immortals.  
Wherever you choose to go you are that high-flying bird  
searching for transcendence and transformation.
13] In dream you visit both heavens and hells with the powers of a god –  
amazing the manifold forms of which you’re creator.  
You take your pleasure with partners, laugh –  
or else encounter nightmares: everything appears real.
People you know may appear in this world at your will:
but you they never see.

14] They say you should not waken a deep sleeper - for someone whose spirit doesn’t reunite with hir body can become deranged. Some claim there’s no difference between sleep and waking – for one sees similar things whether awake or asleep – yet everything you see in sleep is created by your own imagination.
Worthy sir, continue! said King Janaka. I will give you a thousand cows for guiding me toward liberation.

15] Serene in sleep, you follow your bliss and encounter many experiences, both good and bad, yet before returning to your body you will have encountered truth (whether you recognise it or not). Here whatever you see does not imprison your soul, for this state is free from all attachments. 17] Awake, you (also) follow your bliss and encounter many experiences, both good and bad, before returning to your dreamworld. 18] So as a great fish swimming freely hither and thither between the banks, in sleep your consciousness swims freely between the other world and everyday life.
19] Eventually, as an eagle tired after a high flight folds its wings and swoops back down onto its nest, so too this inner self hastens back to your sleeping form, desiring nothing further and forgetting what it has seen.
20] A 1000 times smaller than the arteries (hita) of the heart are the meridians down which the body’s energies run – (which we call) white, blue, yellow, green, and red. 

Now when it seems you’re about to be killed, or captured, or chased by an elephant or that you fall into a pit, this is only the ignorant mind reliving waking fears – but when, like a god or king, you experience wholeness then that is the highest state of being. 21] This is a person’s deepest place, beyond desire, free from evil, free from fear.
Just as someone making love to their partner is oblivious of everything else, so in this inner embrace of self and soul humans experience the fullest wisdom of which they're capable. Here all wishes are fulfilled, for one is preoccupied with the transcendent self alone, and thus without material desire there is no consequential sorrow.

22] Here the father is no longer a father, mother no longer a mother, ecstasy no longer ecstasy, the Vedas no longer Vedas. Here a thief is no longer a thief, an abortionist no longer an abortionist, an outcast no longer an outcast, a mendicant no longer a mendicant, an ascetic no longer an ascetic. Each one now attracts good not misfortune, for all are beyond heart-sadness.
23] Tho in this state your eyes cannot see, yet in your inner vision there is no distinction between seer & sight since both are part of one integrated being. For there is nothing else, nor can anyonelse see what you see.
25] Tho in this state your cannot taste, yet in your inner world there is no distinction between taster & what is tasted, since both are part of one integrated being. There is noonelse to taste anything.
27] Tho in this state you cannot hear or speak, yet in your inner world there is no distinction between what is heard & what is spoken, since both are integrated. Noonelse can know what has been uttered.
28] Tho in this state you cannot think or touch, yet in your inner world there is no distinction between thinker & thought, or toucher & what is touched, since both are one integrated being. Noonelse’s senses or understanding are involved. 30] Similarly, encountering wisdom within oneself is an indivisible experience.

31] When someonelse is present you can compare your comprehension of what you’ve experienced. 32] But in great ocean of dreams you become one unified being, without duality: this is the world of Brahman (universe /universal consciousness). This is at once the highest path, the highest attainment, the highest reward and greatest satisfaction a human being can know. It is this bliss from which all other activities borrow: yet in those, people declare themselves thrilled by the merest fraction of what can be encountered within.

Aphorism

2011-04-21T09:44:00.003Z

Don't play poker with a snake – the snake always wins.

Change

2011-02-25T11:56:00.000Z

You either embrace change, & can influence the outcome – or change (which will happen anyway) 'embraces' you & you can't!

The Unnameable

2010-12-08T09:35:00.007Z

a free version of Kabir’s poem 3/69

The Name that can’t be uttered is unique. 
How then to comprehend the formless? 
What name for a circle with no circumference,
or a square with no corners?

Name reflects form: form defines name. 
Forms yield clarity: clarity amplifies form. 
Duality and form have propagated the world:
yet the Name is within all.

The formless is seed: its fruit is form:
knowledge the branches: the Name a hidden root. 
Throu form seek the formless:
within duality conceive unity.

Within the winter trunk nestles the summer leaf:
cause and effect being rarely linear.
Spirit is not in root alone, nor flower, 
nor in the vital sap – yet life is within all.

Everywhere pleasure lies. Happiness  
lies nowhere but in your unNameable root. 
Seek where you are fertile, resolve your nature: 
in each upheaval see growth husbanding you. 

The unspelled Name pervades all matter: 
yet is visible only by a beating heart. 
Encountering the Name transcends language: 
yet is known only by a beating heart. 
The resolution of this paradox ends all enquiry:
yet the Name can be uttered only by a beating heart.

Apocryphal Wisdom

2010-12-02T12:13:00.001Z

At first wisdom will take thee by crooked paths, but at last she will bring thee out into the straight way.

Release

2010-12-02T11:07:00.002Z

To you I write, blade in hand to harm yourself. 
You have come here to learn: allow yourself the space
and time to grow: do not fear what you might be.

The spirit of life resides in every breathing form: 
each finds a place with the great ecology: 
don’t think you do not fit – you do, where you belong.

You were made for a unique task. Don’t blame yourself 
for what you aren't; rather, hold the space for what 
could be – even if the emptiness becomes unbearable.

It is into that void you must be born: you are the form 
which this new life must take. It's awaiting you. 
The form your healing takes is the world’s rebirth.

Look, I reach toward you, cut my arm instead. 
See the rage, the grief, the isolation well up. 
Allow that energy to transform into prayer.

Pray to the space in which the new you is to be born. 
You were made for something more than your tiny world:  
allow the shadowed universe to enter you:

broadcast your news from the dark side of the moon. 
You don’t know who it’s for – allow yourself to flow
freely into the space, trusting you will be heard.

You are to pioneer new forms of feeling: 
you alone have powers to heal a broken world. 
The richness of transformation is the space that calls you.

To be sure, big steps are called for. Look despair 
in the eye as you say your last good bye. 
The road may be long and hard but he's no companion for you.

Instead, find your other friend, your indwelling seed. 
Nourish your goodness with all the care you'd give a seedling. 
When it grows tall and flowers – that will be your reward.

We are all that is wrong within the world: 
we are all that is right within the world:
it's by our choices we declare which side we’ll join.

You can be different – this you must believe. From it
a thousand flowers bloom even in a wasteland. 
Have compassion to whom you are. Put down the blade.

Christmas - oy vey!

2010-10-13T11:20:00.000Z

Jung says

If you are boys, your God is a woman.
If you women, your God is a boy.
If you are men, your God is a maiden.
The God is where you are not.

Thus we see that actually the world’s sentimental celebration of the ‘harmless’ Christ child is the opposite of what it appears, and is actually a tacit acknowledgement of the world’s own irredeemable cruelty – for if people actually wished to explore & integrate their own unacceptable rapacity they would actually come to terms with what the cross symbolises. But that aspect of Christianity is now almost wholly excluded by our greed. Christmas is a collective pretence that we accept the idea of a second birth, while in practice The West wholly ignores its implications and continues on its plundering murderous path, while blaming its contributions to the world’s ills on Communism or Islam or whoever’s next!
Ho ho. You see I'm in the Christmas spirit already!

James Agee

2010-10-12T12:02:00.000Z

but will not, oh,
will not, not now,
not ever;
but will not ever tell me who I am.

In saying who our gods are – we acknowledge who we are.
In defining our selves – we identify our gods.

Mastery is clear moral insight

2010-10-10T11:50:00.000Z

What distinguishes the true artist is hir response to truth as manifested in the integrity or virtu of the artwork. I must all have the courage to trust what emerges from within me.

As we move to the place where we can say what we have to say we also evolve towards realising of what mettle we are actually composed.

We think the Divine Being is the entity we perceive as God in our minds, but in reality whatever it is that we sense is like looking at landscape throu the lens of a camera - we see only a slice of the terrain, not the infinite totality of the Creative Force, who exceeds the mental limitations of humanity as the universe exceeds the power of human imagination.

Advertising as Capitalism's Revenge on Art

2010-09-19T19:09:00.000Z

Our tragedy today is that we have allowed commercialism to deface all sense of the inner sacred, and thus modern art is no longer able to fulfil art's true function of fostering any sense of the inner sacred.

In an environment where so much pressure exists to conform to trends, the challenge is to find your own meanings, and balance inner truth with outer pressure/s.

Prayer

2010-09-19T17:47:00.004Z

We cannot be sure that prayer changes anything in the exterior world, but we can be quite certain that it changes our own interior world.

Dig

2010-08-18T18:59:00.000Z

My shattered shards of thought lie spread out, 
an incoherent jumble brought
to light by an archæologist.

Lines of individual beauty that don’t  
connect, more dug up all the time.  
What am I seeking? Evidence
that I exist/ed? Buried treasure?

Or do I want it all miraculously
to spring together like a tape played backwards,  
where the big bang is reversed, and a beautiful  
vase forms in one immaculate gesture?

Thus I, a human, caught between being and doing, 
unable to rise or fall, held in suspense
between the polarities of my desire
fully reaching neither sky nor earth, 
examine the inner world, searching
for things of beauty, things of coherence –  
perhaps the runes of my existence?

Michelangelo's Epitaphs

2010-07-23T07:29:00.000Z

I paraphrased this selection of Michelangelo Buonarotti's poems for a friend whose dauter had suicided.

Epitaph 2. Deh Serbi
Don’t pity me who lies here,
I am free of the world:
Pity rather yourselves
who must still endure it.

Epitaph 7. Qui son sepulto
Buried here, a mere child
in death’s embrace. Stealthily,
craftily, he stole my soul
so that I never knew I’d lived.

Epitaph 12. Qui son morto
You who loved me may think me dead,
yet if you love me still, see me
in the many thousand lovers
who never knew of my existence.

Epitaph 18. Se fussin
If you weep for me
you return me to life.
Have pity, I am free.
Do not invite me back.

Epitaph 41. Qui stese
When death beckoned
my flower became his fruit,
returning to the earth
in love with darkness.

Meditation

2010-06-27T08:49:00.000Z

Meditation is where you allow what you do to fall away, so that you can (re)encounter who you are.

TAO

2010-06-25T09:40:00.000Z

If you have music in your soul the whole universe will hear your melody.

If you realise that all things change, there is nothing you need to hold onto. If you are not afraid of dying there is nothing you cannot achieve.

I often ask rhetorically why my work is not recognised? And I believe the answer is that as it expresses a dharmic view, which is not generally acknowledged these days, it is like the sword in the stone that must await someone with an appropriately complementary view of life to draw forth sound from its current silence.

Listening to … what?

2010-06-25T08:42:00.000Z

When we talk of listening to God in fact we mean attuning to the 'voice' (/thoughts) that are latent within our transpersonal unconscious, the impulse/s to wholeness that are part of our make-up.

'If the fool would persist in his folly he should become wise.' W Blake

2010-06-19T07:30:00.000Z

If you meditate on the question of your ultimate nature, then in time you come to understand the end point at which to aim, and so (after the journey throu 'otherness') you ultimately arrive home at the true self you never left.

Schumann 200

2010-06-07T08:27:00.000Z

EBU Schumann Sunday celebrating the bicentenary of his birth in many ways deepened, rather than enlightened, the mysteries surrounding his personality. He was obviously a person of demonic energy: in his 20s publishing his music journal twice a week as well as composing. It certainly points towards a schizoid or bipolar makeup, where he was conscious within the mania that drove him that there existed an unresolved aspect of his personality, but instead of making any rapprochement with it, he kept it at arms length (by naming it Eusebius) until it overwhelmed him.

Alarmingly, Clara was only 8 when he started teaching her. If ever there was a case of anima projection, that would be it.

What it makes me think, as I have often in other contexts, that whatever the gifts people have, where they do not seek to ground & integrate them in a search for transpersonal wisdom, then ‘all that raised the hero [sinks] the man’ - their very talents are sometimes what leads to the irremediable personality distortions by which they become known. People say they have no need of God, but that is what the need is.

Blessings & Curses are intertwined

2010-06-05T07:53:00.000Z

I realised recently that whatever wisdom I have acquired throu direct experience (for instance by poking my tiny fingers into an electric plug when <2!) has led me on the path to the 'owned knowledge' of the direct mysticism that is now an integral part of my life. Contrariwise: the way in which I have never been able to assimilate knowledge from books, despite being a fair bookworm, was one of the reasons I ran away from school, and to this day can never bear to read a computer program handbook, or grasp it if I do.
First I must do: then I can theorise. But thats not the way education works these days.

Ethical Christianity / welcoming synchronicity

2010-05-27T19:27:00.001Z

As a European, I don’t think I can adequately apologise to people in the rest of the world for the immoral mixture of high ideals and low motives with which Europeans set out to subjugate their countries. It was a kind of good cop /bad cop routine which remains current to this day, whereby a cat’s paw (eg Bush) proclaims noble intentions while the cat itself (eg Cheney) goes right ahead & helps itself to whatever it fancies.
A cynic would say: well that’s just what happens when races clash. Dress it up in whatever language you like, but ultimately there will be winners and there will be losers. The guy with the big stick gets to call the tune.

In the light of this discussion I thought it relevant to post this piece which I wrote in response to an article Canterbury Cathedral Old Choristers Association journal by one of my closest boyhood friends (whom I've never met since), who had a successful career as a jazz drummer with some q celebrated English groups, but ultimately felt a vocation to the Anglican priesthood.

Some of my most abiding ethical roots are grounded in my childhood Psalm singing. I quote these verses from memory as they’ve always stayed with me:
Keep innocency, take heed to the thing that is right: for that shall bring a man peace at the last. –
Commit thy way unto the Lord, and put thy trust in him, and he shall bring it to pass. –
I have been young, and now am old; and yet saw I never the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread. [Whoever wrote that never freelanced for a media corporation!]
And finally Ps49, Man being in honour hath no understanding; but may be compared unto the beasts of the field which perish. [or as William Goldman succinctly put it: ‘In Hollywood noone knows anything.’]
Winter evensongs, where the choir often outnumbered the civilians (& thus under Equity rules would not have been obliged to perform!) remain an abiding definition of the purity of true worship. To this day I detest applause. Why, in the name of…?? I recently had a dream in which I saw the interior of Canterbury Cathedral without choir stalls, screen or any ornaments as a naked building: and that expresses my sense of what a mother church needs to be: Christianity stript of the accretions of time & tradition as these mask its rebirth as an ethical force by slowly turning into objects of veneration instead of vehicles for it.
As a former pupil of [cathedral organist] Allan Wicks, I regret that my life doesn’t often have space for organ playing, and thus this year I went to discuss the question of taking up the post of organist & choirmaster in my village, which has a good instrument & a choir which can call on a lot of enthusiastic singers locally – but after going to a Eucharist I really couldn’t stomach the pre-Darwinian faith statements: tho I have no difficulty whatever with the Bible as a kind of bardic poetry which, like Early Music, forms a numinous hotline to ‘palæo-emotional’ worlds foreign to 21stC consciousness. I say this having just taken 5 years to read the Bible cover-to-cover in the light of contemporary archaeology, prehistoriography and scholarship,
My difficulty with the so-called apostolic tradition is exemplified by my recent time in California, where I took the opportunity to study the Catholic church’s relationship with the ‘first nations’. I’ll spare you the details; suffice it to say that to many peoples around the world the name of Christ is more associated with cruelty & dislocation than with love or inclusion. Slavery, forced conversions and the centuries of religious persecution shaped the current world, and it seems to me that the mainstream churches need formally to acknowledge their own participation (as German Protestants did with Nazism) before they can be renew themselves as spiritual powerhouses.
There have of course been remarkable Christians who have understood these issues: Anglicans Trevor Huddlestone & Donald Reeves, both Rectors of St James’s Piccadilly, among them: but that does not appear to be the direction in which contemporary Anglicanism is heading. My own attempts to interest Wiltshire churches in coming to hear a visiting Sufi were met with a comically antediluvian set of responses.
Apart from dear naive Hewlett Johnson’s popular Sunday evening sermons about the marvels of Communist society,* or Canon Standon’s ‘cricket commentary sermons’ where runs would be scored according to his gestures, my one abiding memory of a Canterbury sermon was that of a visiting preacher in about 1958. I've no idea of his name, but remember as he processed between the choir stalls behind a verger how diffident & uncomfortable he appeared in a borrowed cassock & surplice amid the pomp of ecclesiastical ceremony. However, once in the pulpit this youngish man spoke eloquently & authoritatively without notes about the churches’ responsibility to the developing world. Most of the content went over my 12 yearold head, but I do remember the immense stir it created, and Canon Bickersteth’s aside to Precentor Lawson after the dismissal prayers: “I shouldn’t be surprised if that young man ends up as one of the church’s martyrs.“ Therefore I understand that churches can be vehicles for such ‘enthusiasm’ just as the most stolid orchestra can be galvanised by a charismatic conductor. It's just that, for me, other vehicles do it better.

My own life, which has included several profound spiritual experiences, most recently in front of an ikonostasis in Moscow, but I have found my most sustained source of transformation throu Quaker worship, which my wife & I practice every morning we're together. (She is often away for extended periods, currently 3 months, in her profession as a costume designer.) Tho if I have a regret, it is that as a result of being brought up in the Society of Friends our kids don’t know any hymns.
For 10 years I was coordinator of the Ethics/Spirituality/Philosophy Field of the Big Green Gathering (an alternative to Glastonbury’s assimilation into the mainstream) and had the privilege of hosting a number of remarkable speakers from the gamut of faiths. The thing that I observed with sadness was that, generally, representatives of the established Christian denominations were unable to get off the high horses of their traditional right to privilege, and thus utterly failed to communicate with festival-goers in the way that Buddhists, Krishna-folk and other even weirder sects did – as the growth and energy of their movements attest.
How does all of this relate to my work as a musician? Very intimately. A visionary percussionist few will have heard of named Frank Perry once said to me: “When I'm over there, I'll be able to hear the effect of everything I did here: so I'm extremely careful not to make any sounds I don’t want to spend eternity with.“ I used to get deprest that none of my ‘heart music’ seems likely to come out in my lifetime – as opposed to all the cheap & cheerful claptrap I wrote during my broadcasting career. But now actually I can cherish in its silence the beauty of those winter cathedral evensongs, an ageless mysticism exprest by the 15thC Urdu poet Kabir: ‘The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me. The dance of God goes on without hands and feet. The harp of God is played without fingers, it is heard without ears: For the universal ear is hirself the hearer.’
What I have come to worship is the privilege of Life, flowing like a spring from an invisible source we can only wonder at. The bigger picture clicked into place for me when I saw that evolution and love are simply expressions of the same dynamic of re-growth which exists in all organic matter. And, yes, I see the persona of Christ as central to the unfolding manifestation of divine wisdom in human experience – but as a facilitator of the flow, not as a rock standing up in the river’s natural path.
The stained-glass sound of Anglican psalm chanting has a profoundly beautiful meditative quality, yet like all ritual it can also serve to mask the passionate urgency of the life & death issues which the psalmist faced, and which face any-and-every-one who engages personally with the Spirit in their lives.
*The ‘Red Dean’ wore a pectoral cross given him by Stalin. I can vividly remember the outraged incredulity on my grandmother’s face as he held it up to her, in the reception after my Confirmation, as proof of Stalin’s commitment to the place of faith in his new society.

What I would add as a postscript to this, is that I think the real challenge in life is to retain the freshness of one’s impulse to spiritual self-actualisation with a groundedness & flexibility that shows one where /when things (have) become unreal, so that one doesn’t become what VF calls ‘one-sided’ - for instance locked into a formulaic belief system, or politically committed to an ethical perspective resulting in the ultimate moral enantiodromia where ‘mights’ become ‘shoulds’ and ‘shoulds’ become ‘musts’ so the synchronistic phenomena become an unwanted reminder of what has been sacrificed in order to achieve the expedient outcome.
Synchronistically, while I was writing this para my dauter Sefa’s track Public Spirited came up on my iTunes. I recommend it as a listen: http://itunes.apple.com/pt/album/public-spirited-ep/id287669201

Thoughts on the early Spanish missionaries to California & their relationship with the Mexicans

2010-05-01T17:53:00.000Z

Being here, with time to reflect while Clancy has been labouring industriously, Ive given a lot of thought to the psychic resonance of California, particularly relationship between the Catholic Missionaries & the indigenous peoples; trying to see how the balance-sheet stacks up.

In Alta (present day) California the 'first nation/s' were hunter-gatherer tribes living at survival level, but in Baja California & Meso-America they were elaborate civilisations which the conquistadors shattered. As far as I can see the population of the latter were so cowed by the outrageous cruelty of their belief-system, that they therefore adapted relatively easily, indeed willingly, to the brutal simplicity (or simple brutality) of the Franciscans - who were allowed by their order to administer up to 25 lashes by way of 'correction'. An idea that their founder would have found 'surprising', yet in which they found no paradox. For an actual 'punishment' military force was required.

By the missionaries emphasis on the cross, the redemptive suffering aspect of Christ, it seems that both conqueror & conquered were united by their separately-interpreted cult/s of death in a sado-masochistic pact - where violence & death were simply a given part of their 'realities'. The one mutually-enjoyed sport was bull fighting! (Indeed you could say that this legacy persists in Hollywood where any amount of violence is permitted, but two people are not allowed to be seen in bed naked.)

When Clancy & I visited Portugal 6 years ago we were struck by what I termed the cult of ecstatic death. And the existence of this was very much confirmed by what I read about the recent Zurbaràn exhibition in London, tho didnt see it. The whole theology that the Franciscans were preaching in the new world appeared to be that suffering was the way to heaven, a suffering they doubtless experienced themselves in the very harsh conditions, and were happy to enforce in the belief that they were assisting 'the natives' path to (their) God. The very opposite to liberation theology.

What has been interesting to study in the various museums is the way in which Mexican* art & rituals remain fixated by death of this very day: altho most surviving art is veneered with Christianity, no doubt sincerely, the frequent presence of the skull or death-mask in 'native' art indicate not a culture of transfigured death but a starkly intractable, almost pornographic, obsession with the death, not as final but as an occult reality: where the spirits of the disembodied can be prayed to and invoked, as happens in candomblé & other chthonic South American religions. There is an amusing series of models in one museum of skeletons dressed in everyday Mexican clothing cheerily but spookily performing normal tasks such as riding a bicycle or knife grinding.

It is as if the prevailing 'folk view' of death is of people continuing to live exactly the same life as they did before but dead. There is no heaven, no transformation, just 'life(/death) as normal'. In the centuries after the missionary era the Catholic church seems to have assimilated this subtext in a way that allowed both Western-Christian & indigenous South American interpretations to coexist by carefully never articulating a received understanding of the death cult symbolism.
I saw a film a couple of years back which showed that the font of a large basilica in Mexico City is actually carved from a basalt sacrificial altar. I think it probable that the indigenous peoples here dont see any contradiction in this - anymore than Europeans do in the fact that our calendar & religious ideas are based on a Christianisation of Roman customs. In one museum I read a report that early ethnographers had the utmost difficulty in discovering what the various celebratory practices actually meant to those who performed them, because the fetish-wearers would usually reply simply “it is the custom”.

*All California was Mexican after the collapse of the Spanish empire until the US invasion of 1847 captured Alta California. As a matter of fact the AmerIndians, supposedly freed from their serfdom to the Franciscans where they were kept confined in what were essentially self-supporting concentration camps of up to 2500 neophytes (Christian converts), suffered worse under Mexican measures designed to liberate them & make the mission stations into pueblos (self-governing communities), because, without experience of business, the AmerIndians were easily duped out of their rights, often by corrupt Mexican Govt officials themselves. This was compounded after 1847 when unscrupulous American lawyers registered ownership of land which the Indians believed they owned by hereditary right.

My conclusion, after a great deal of study & reflection, is that the coming of Christianity to MesoAmerica was probably beneficial, as the social order that existed there was truly bestial for all its sophistication. (eg this altar stone in the form of a python's head) The replacement of that myth with a benigner one can only have been good, notwithstanding the negative aspects of its imposition.

In the case of the AmerIndians I see little evidence that enforced Christianisation was in their interests, either in intention or effect. As with Australian aborginals the tribes lived reasonably peaceably within the rhythms of the land, occasionally migrating & skirmishing with neibours as European nation-tribes had done in the prehistoric era, thus Catholic attempts to convert, settle & 'civilise' their people as individuals without regard to sensitive tribal balances led to the more-or-less unmitigated disaster all over America Norte. OTOH you could look at it that phenomenologically and say that when cultures collide it's inevitable there will be a winner & a loser.

Another interesting question is why the MesoAmericans evolved a highly elaborate social organisation & the AmerIndians didnt? Given that theyre the same Asiatic ethnic stock the only explanation seems to be a Marxist one, that environment in which the former lived was economically productive enough to allow settlement and ultimately social diversification. Thus people could be released from agriculture to socially productive tasks like building and art. Whereas the latter's environment made even the transition from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist infeasible.

At least one of the local AmerIndian tribes, whose land I visited, seems to have got its act together rather conspicuously http://www.palatribe.com/. But that may just be a function of its survival at all. It has a vast casino & resort.

Others, such as the native Diegan Kuméyaay (kumI-A), exist only as names. Interestingly, for those who have studied the distinction between tribalism & larger social groupings, the name for the Kuméyaay shamans was Kuseyaay indicating philologically how this role more than the temporal leadership was the central role of their existence.

--

A further clue to the relationship was given in a meeting I had with some San Diego piano teachers. One said of a pupil: because of the tears I knew she had made a real link to the music. In the context of this article, the relevance of that remark is that I at once saw that the Friars would have quickly learnt that drawing tears from their illiterate audience was the clearest form of connexion, and that the best way to touch these unsophisticated people was to preach to them about the physical pain & suffering of Christ. And that the peculiarly Spanish hyper-realistic evocation of the pain of the cross must both have touched these simple credulous people, but also served as a reminder & warning of the pain they might experience if they did not follow the church's teachings - both here & hereafter.

Given that Spain was the nation that created the grisliest game show ever, the Auto-da-Fè where the accused were invited to recant of sins without even knowing exactly what they were charged with, where the public entertainment was that if their recantation didnt match the (invisible) charge-sheet, or even if it did, they were likely to be burnt anyway, pour encourager les autres; and given the literalistic view of the Spanish that whatever torment they inflicted was justified if it 'saved' the sinner from 'a worse fate'. And how would the Friars know who had truly repented & been saved unless they wept? And how would they make them weep? I suspect there are some very dark links that bound the missionaries to their neophytes and that was where the secret of the strange occult link between persecutor/s & victim/s lay.

Beside the Famosa Slough

2010-04-22T07:15:00.005Z

We are the sum total of all the experiences
that brought us to this point –
the open hiways, the dead ends,
the musts, the shouldnts,
the love, the scorn,
the gifts received and given,
the times alone and in company,
the elation, the grief,
the connections, the disintegrations.
More than this,
we’re a product of all those we kissed.

Looking at a birth chart,
so much was predictable:
yet we did not know it,
or weren’t ready to hear:
the tasks given to each alone, which we sought to fulfill,
some with applause, some indifference,
some useful to the world, some only to us.

For each a different footpath to discern;
having in common, discovery of a topography of meaning
to populate each self-made landscape
wherein we seek an authenticity, within constraints
which sustain the ego, and give each life its form –
probabilities as programd for us, as for a palm or samphire:
snake and deer alike, products of environmental logic.

So …
sitting above this lagoon at high tide,
I watch the fingers of water caress the web of knowing plants,
all unaware yet fully-conscious of a life heuristic.

When I come down I shall be different:
in descending I do not change.
If I become what I was not,
then I have already been what I could be.

The subtle dynamics of life lying always
between the hills of irreconcilable opposites,
over a pass that is invisible
until we have left the valley.

Each outcome a new birth, neither one nor other:
change lying only in our acceptance
of the new synthesis, without
clinging to its parent duality.

The hearing eye, the seeing ear –
The unwritten novel, the unrecorded CD –
The seconds before the avalanche of love …
In pregnancy of doubt we cherish a divine uncertainty all fear:
a nomansland that is neither hesitation nor commitment:
the silences in music when all possibilities open –
engulfing terror as we await our entrance –
These release the ego into volitionless being,
articulating the paradox within which lies truth.

It is not in the nature of the universe to provide unequivocal statements:
Everything is conditional and contingent, until, suddenly,
without warning, we see all the elements aligned, and then,
if we seize the moment and respond, revelation comes.

Looking here within this poem to discern its dynamic
I wonder what it called me here to hear?
At standing water between two tides, in a salt-water sanctuary
beaten by sun, for what message I am merely the secretary?
What enigmatic meaning is seeping out like marsh gas, unnoticed …
silently amplifying itself to apocalypse or epiphany?

Looking here within this life to discern its dynamic
what am I told? How? Who is speaking?
At high tide, does the foaming water demand
immersion, or advise retreat?
Only the heart knows which direction this synchronistic moment invites …
On (or back) to triumph? Back (or forward) to defeat?
All turns on openness of attitude to the unknown.

So …
The search for truth: an attunement:
an unmediated negotiation
between beauty, economy
and proportionality;
And the delicate thing in all this:
the role of the inner teacher –
the absorbed otherness,
the indwelling not-I
With whom we must make peace
before fertility comes;
the heredity to be embraced,
willingly or otherwise:
Often, as a healing crisis
in which the collapse of ego
allows one's separate I to drop
into its embracing ocean of not-I.
Some dramatise this encounter in terms of
angels or Jedi; but it leads back, finally,
to a naked encounter with a burning bush,
in whose crucible the sacred I AM is forged.

Teaching /Taming Tantrum-driven Teens

2010-03-05T21:53:00.000Z

To teach adolescents the teacher requires a fairly robust ego, as it’s important not to respond to the provocation that can be attempted. Just as some play games with their sexuality, so others enjoy experimenting with their power: and no power is so cherished as the ability to wind up (or put the wind up) teachers, especially these days when pupils know how vulnerable teachers are. It's not to say that every teenager will – of course not – but the more confident the teacher is, the less likely the pupil is to express hir own insecurity by seeking confrontation.
    The great teacher Shinui Suzuki said: ‘first I trained myself not to show frustration; and then I trained myself not to feel frustration.’ From personal observation teachers are most likely to feel /show anger when they themselves are unable to see how to explain to a pupil the correct way of doing something. (Elgar apparently was so volatile that outgoing violin pupils would issue ‘weather warnings’ the incomers.) My general view is that ‘a pupil only has a problem if the teacher has a problem.’ I have found that if I can conceptualise the problem clearly -& appropriately for that pupil- s/he can invariably overcome it. I see my own role as that of the sweeper in ice hockey who smoothes the passage of the puck towards the goal.
    The delight of teaching kids and teens is that once you’ve found out where their ‘blue touch paper’ is & ignited it with repertoire they enjoy, they go like rockets. But that doesn’t always make it plain sailing. I have one particularly ‘vivid’ young lady of 12 whose parents bring her a considerable distance. This means that she enjoys piano enough to give up two hours of her Sunday, but unless her mother* is present there are some lessons in which she argues the toss on every comment I make. “What’s the matter with that?” she’ll say aggressively after playing a piece with 90% accuracy. So I tell her, and the reply will be “Well I did that!” or “What does it matter? I like it that way.” Having had two dauters myself I've learnt that such behaviour is often hormonal, hence it’s irregular manifestation, but it’s particularly important as a teacher not to respond – because a) young people don’t mean it, or aren't aware of the ‘adult’ overtone to their words, or b) they're picking a proxy fight that they can't have with their parent. Either way it’s important not to trigger a war since while the teacher may win the battle, the longterm casualty will be music.
    I'm fortunate in that I teach entirely privately, and thus have a 1:1 relationship with pupils & parents, which makes it simple to unravel complications if they emerge. The part that I hated most about teaching at the RCM was the need for everything to go throu hierarchical loops, and the fact that the ‘professor’s’ power to facilitate radical alterations to the student’s overview was essentially limited to changing the lightbulb.
    This brings me to a deeply held conviction that what adolescents need in /from learning a musical instrument is a ‘rumpus room’. Amid the fearful amount of examining and the rigid control applied to their lives, they benefit colossally from being given a space where they can be responsible for their own learning. And for this reason, as much as for any other, I consider music exams positively injurious to an adolescent’s psychological well-being. I believe this applies just as much to intending musicians as to casual learners.
    Children actually want to learn. If ‘uninterefered-with’ they're little sponges, soaking up new skills. If you make it clear that they control the pace of their own learning, and pupils feel that as the teacher you really understand the kind of musical experience they want, then, unless there are other hidden inhibitors, they will generally go full ahead. The problem comes with the ‘interference’ of curriculums & regulations that require them to learn things that are emotionally irrelevant. No wonder they turn from sponges into crabs with impenetrable shells. Who wouldn’t?
    In the case of the ‘vivid’ pupil, her blessing /curse is that she is a brilliant sight-reader, and thus it’s precisely because she can usually wing it that what makes her particularly angry is to be made to concentrate on the difference between ‘good enough’ and ‘excellent’. Especially as she feels she should be congratulated for getting so much right with so little practice. The teaching point in all this, as I see it, is to try to help her value her own potential excellence, in order to achieve ‘ownership’ of what she does.

    And this leads me to the deeper issues. This girl comes from a socially well-connected background (her excuse for not practising in the recent halfterm was that she was in Caribbean!), and one of the big problems for rich kids in private schools is that our elitist /technocratic education does nothing to encourage personal introspective engagement. Without the emotional grit of having personally to overcome adverse circumstances there is no ‘alterity’ in the lives of middleclass kids, no balancing negativity to help them locate themselves within all the positive opportunities thrown at them – by which alone they might acquire some traction in developing their own inner self. That’s why drugs are so attractive: they represent a shadow existence which is absent from the adolescent’s conscious environment.
    However learning to achieve excellence in a performing activity can simulate the necessary adversity, safely – because confronting the fear that performance brings, within an environment where it’s ok to fail, creates a favourable heuristic dynamic in a teenager’s life. If all their other learning environments are driven by externally directed (& emotionally irrelevant) goals which they can more or less skate throu, then why bother to invest in anything personally? Especially since in the rest of their educational existence who they are personally doesn’t matter: each is just a blob of protein in a vast educational sausage who, provided they don’t seek the path of individuation, will be force-fed throu the system until they emerge with life on a plate in front of them.
    The thing about my ‘vivid’ pupil is that she's too emotionally aware to accept that, and thus her bolshiness is a way of creating an adversity that allows her to achieve some kind of individuality, albeit of a negative kind. It may not be much of an ‘achievement’, but it’s the adolescent application of a ‘baby tool’. I have always told her parents (who are not far from their wits’ end about her) that I feel within her there is the kernel of a future authenticity, to achieve which she may ‘choose’ in young adulthood to place herself in negative situations – which is simply what the robust psyche knows intuitively to be the best school for self-realisation.
    As it happens, she enjoys the piano and has considerable ability. Throu learning the piano I hope her juvenile ‘palate’ may become aware that what is unsweet may have a deeper longterm value in life’s gastronomy than what is immediately tasty. She's resisting this because to achieve personal excellence (she knows) will demand differentiation from the pack & that’s not a price she's willing to pay - yet.

    I'd like to close by alluding to the longterm emotional damage inflicted on individuals, and thus on society as a whole, by forcing young people to study things without engaging them in the moral dimension of learning. It seems to me such a colossal, elementary, and wholly avoidable, psychological mistake. If you make music, or any other subject, emotionally relevant to children then you engage them whole-heartedly and equip them with a resource for life. My punch-line about the piano is that: whatever repertoire kids learn must work for them in the playground. (The caveat being that what ‘works for them’ in the playgrounds of a comprehensive vs a specialist music school will be completely different.) This doesn’t mean that you can't wean pupils onto more demanding repertoire, it just means you need to be aware of how music fits into the overall ecology of their cultural environment.
    It seems to me completely pointless to demand all young pianists achieve the same technical or theoretical requirements of grade exams as intending musicians. In the long run it's more likely to turn them off music altogether. I often hear colleags bewail ‘how hard it is to retain the interest of adolescents’ and think, but never say, ‘of course it is, with the exam music you give them!’ Whereas by listening to what they want (& often by tippexing so-called ‘Easy Play’ into pianist-friendly versions) I've been particularly successful in keeping teenagers’ love of music alive. It gives me pleasure to hear that one young ex-pupil was able to support himself by playing bar piano during training as an RAF pilot! And another is still playing, despite being a motor mechanic. I don’t think you'll find that kind of music on the syllabus of the ABRSM, but the fact that both already understood the lingua franca of contemporary pop made it easy for them to pick up new tunes.
    A society made up of people who can relate to their skills to the world they encounter is more likely to be a happy society than one made-up of over-educated people ‘qualified’ to do things that don’t engage them.

Synchronicity

2010-02-22T11:36:00.000Z

Dear John

You’ve touched on an important point: who wouldn’t love to have a benign synchronicity ruling their life? Unfortunately, to think that you can produce that without doing the work on yourself first is to put the cart before the horse.

The dream of every ‘natural’ human is to think that we can rule the natural world. Unless you're a born witch you can't. I hardly need to tell you, I'm sure, that a second ‘birth’ is required where you are brought to discard your ego, and begin to listen to your environment & then, infinitely slowly, learn to pick up cues from it & so synchronicity grows from you attuning to it (for it is only the expression of your own inner dynamic or true self).

For me it has taken two decades of conscious intention to renounce conscious intention! Have you noticed how the truly untouchable human beings are the least defended? The great saints have reconciled their own inner contradictions & therefore no longer arouse contradictions (& thus aggression) in others – therefore they don’t consciously bring peace, they are peace, and so synchronicitously Peace is what happens around them.

I doubt that you can produce synchronicity by studying it, because you can only study presenting symptoms, you can't study the occult process by which these occur. We all have days when the bus comes exactly as we want it, or we somehow magically manage to get round all our appointments without missing a beat - or a boat. But this is small potatoes: all we want is to have our cake & eat it. True synchronicity only begins when it happens the other way round: we allow ourselves to be used by it – we allow ourselves to be moved & changed by the forces of universe acting in concert with & throu our psyche ... When we truly ‘will to will thy will’. Then we miraculously begin to turn up where we're needed, and find that our plans sync with people who are willing to support them because they're motivated by the same calling and were just waiting for someone to sound the right note.

Writing this has been broken into by a phone call from a friend who has ridden to the rescue of the Big Green Gathering, a long-standing eco-festival that was going to collapse into bankruptcy at its AGM y/day – which, synchronicity if you will, was happening in my village! This guy, also John, saw how the BGG could be transformed & because he had vision & a clear grip of reality (which wasn’t true of the founding directors who had led the cooperative into debt) & his energetic commitment has convinced a seriously loaded individual to underwrite the recovery of the festival, to which he had already lent £60k.

If you want it to happen for you it won't: you have to be willing to happen for it, without any preconditions about what it is. In my own life, by being willing to walk away from everything I'd worked for (my London music+broadcasting career) I have been rewarded a millionfold. Yes, there was a big dark night that lasted years [whose documentary record is on this blog], but everything ‘horrible’ that happened actually had the effect of teaching me ‘real’ values. All the good things that have started to happen to me this year have come about, I believe, because I have at last been able to accept that I don’t need anything: at the point where I've stopt grabbing at things & people they’ve given themselves to me naturally.

Just keep your faith on the journey: you're given darkness to test your navigation system. If you can continue to steer straight by the stars you'll find you’ve traveled far farther by night than you imagined possible, and far farther than those who simply rolled up into a ball & hibernated in despair when the lights went out.
Best
Mx

'The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom'

2010-02-16T08:58:00.000Z

When we are without fear it is as if we are not fully present. Not because we should be timid, but because we should be awed by the wonderful of life itself.

”Wiser and more capable men that I shall ever be have put their findings before you, findings so rich and so full of anger, serenity, murder, healing, truth and love that it seems incredible the world were not destroyed and fulfilled in the instant ...“ (James Agee)

”Duende alone makes us live.“ (Lorca)

We do not begin to discover, let alone, live a creative life until we enter into a relationship with our otherness, and that alterity is defined by a consciousness of the void within and over which we live.

When we are conscious of how we could fall, or indeed when we are brought low, then we see, sometimes for the first time, what reality is. Because for each of us, our personal reality is defined by our own alterity.

Write!

2010-01-18T16:03:00.000Z

Write what?
Write that your job is to bring love into the world. You do this by following your path, becoming fully conscious /present in the world, and seeking opportunities for harmony to emerge.

St Nicholas, Khamnoviki, Moskva

2010-01-14T09:13:00.000Z

The priest withdrew to the chancel, attended by acolytes
and followed by worshippers – straggling throu the rough stone arch,
a hundred in all maybe: the old ones wearing black,
but also young urban families with anxious mothers in head-scarves
and youngsters with quilted jackets; plus a smattering of well-dressed
middle-aged women the communists would’ve labeled class enemies.

The low square nave slowly assumed a flickering stillness,
every painted inch absorbing the veneration
of a second wave of solitary iconophiles,
nondescript figures who moved and paused, and moved and paused,
mouthing prayers and crossing themselves continually.

The distant intonation of a homily
did not engage these private devotees, nor
the punk in street clothes with a fist of candles, lighting
them at random stations. This ancient heart of Russia
still beating fervently for all its long submersion.

Discreetly photographing faith’s timeless pageant, my eye
is drawn to a queue for a silver icon with blackened images.
The faithful mount a dais, triple-cross themselves,
kiss its covering glass – for a moment illuminated
in the bright reflexion – triple-cross again,
and descend once more into obscurity.

I join the shuffling queue, uncertain of how to behave.
Before it, touching my head to the glass I am visited
by a sudden rush of physical energy, as if
‘Our Lady, mother of victories’ had thrown a pan of heated
water at my face, drenching my head and shoulders
in a shocking baptism – delivered without preamble
or explanation. For me to decode its significance.

A mystical Russia now opens before me, where glory and savagery
coexist – this silent inner knowledge stretching
from here back to infinity, linking believer
and unbeliever in a majestic brutal bedrock
reality, unglossed by transient politics
or sentimental western ideas of normality.

Just then, the service ended and all the bells broke loose
as these indistinct individuals emerged to freezing sunlight,
honoured in the street by this majestic clangour,
and momentarily lightened from the oppressive city,
before melting back into their anonymous lives.
And I – left standing – uncertain if my life had changed
dramatically … or subtly … or not at all.

So, in all encounters, exists the option of change:
but how to recognise or unwrap these hidden gifts?
How to decode its meaning or reorientate our compass?
Experiences such as this show meaning itself to be plastic.
The challenge: to trust the unknown process moulding us into
an unfamiliar shape, during its amorphous phase.

The mystery of magic is the mystery of faith –
the way the fog of doubt dissolves when least expected
(like a crystal rainbow falling across the page) *
and we emerge to find an unfamiliar sunlight
with all the bells of heaven ringing in our ears –

and yet our human state’s unchanged, absolving us
from nothing that before was deeply troubling us –
but still we know, somehow, we’re indefinably different:
suddenly oppression’s lifted, and we have resources
to meet the challenges head on. Tho the final battle
may yet involve a descent from this very brightness into
the womby dark to tackle what we hoped to’ve escaped,
but was itself the gift that had come to change us for good.

St Nicholas of the Weavers,
Khamnoviki, Moscow
(Dec 2008) – 11/09/2009

*I had to include this line because it actually happened as I wrote! I will eventually upload the picture to prove it.

A Christmas Wish

2009-12-20T11:36:00.000Z

If I could make one wish for the world this Christmas, I would not wish away pain, suffering or distress - rather, I would wish away greed, insecurity and doubt.
I would wish that everyone could find meaning in their lives, and throu that acquire a positive and compassionate attitude.
I would wish that everyone could see throu the delusions of wealth and glamour, and see that personal authenticity is the only goal worth pursuing.
I would wish that people would realise that emotional awareness is of greater benefit to humanity than any technical accomplishment.
I would wish that that those who aim to inspire change would realise that the only person they need to change is themselves, and that if they could accomplish that everything they desire would follow as day follows night.
I would wish that love would be born anew in each heart and become each person's inner guide.

Vers Libéré

2009-09-17T07:28:00.000Z

At best, poetry resonates with spirit,
evoking joyful recognition of feelings –
the poem’s individual voice a balance of
subject, poet and otherness – the sweet spot
for each to find by personal attunement.

These days, distrustful of all non-material meanings,
we no longer call that otherness God;
yet the endurance of certain poetry stands
as witness to individual triangulation:
where intunity and intensity couple
producing a truly authentic timbre of voice.

Subject, poet, otherness = the sweet spot.
Were I to shout this, I'd immediately burst
the membrane of truth holding it together.
We might call it the prayer of the unconscious –
the yeast by which matter transmutates to spirit –
a private worship of the tao, an honouring
of living springs which flows in every heartspace,
connecting aquifers and the greater river.

I would not know this, had I not voluntarily
entered the wilderness 20 years ago.
Well, no, perhaps not voluntarily!
A dynamic entered my life from a single dream
creating a constant innergy that led me
off life’s oily, dusty, noisy highway.

Entering a room without artificial light requires
time for the eye to adjust to the natural darkness –
allowing a natural sense of wonder to form
wherein we hold a numinous communion:
observer :: observed :: and the harmonic of observation.

If I were to tell you the figure who appeared in this dream
it would immediately puncture the image you’ve drawn
by localizing it to the physical world.
The way I honour my iconic figure in art
is to distil the quintessence of what I'm shown:
presenting it now as poetry, now as music …

a metaphysical representation of spirit
innergising, throu my own unconscious,
the calling home – the calling to evolve –
the calling to be present :: grounded and yet
illuminated by the numinous.
16/09/2009

What do you need when you've got what you want?

2009-08-18T18:07:00.001Z

I was feeling a bit glum, having just composed some rather beautiful music and being unable to see how to get it taken up, when my inner voice spoke: “This is what you wanted – to become fully conscious of your own voice & truth. Now you've achieved it, you're complaining that it isn't enough.”
So I responded, then what's the next step? To which the answer was “Wait & see!”

Information & Innergy

2009-08-10T10:51:00.000Z

I was thinking just recently how profound the word in-form is. If we're looking for a word tha expresses spontaneous auto-generated form then 'in-formed' is ideal. Yet the word has lost that meaning entirely. To say that you will keep someone informed is to suggest you will send them something that may or may not be relevant to them. The very last thing in-form-ation implies is valuable content that could alter someone's mental makeup. Yet to allow yourself to be in-formed by an idea is a wonderful image.

Another new word we might adopt is innergy. I was struck by its possibilities when I heard an American speak about energy. But innergy really expresses what energy is in a personal sense

For Jonathan Harvey

2009-07-16T10:37:00.003Z

When we think we come to the end of things,
in fact we arrive only at a new beginning.

Nowhere is this more true than in death
where altered reality begins with a final breath.

The arc of life inexorably leads
to this. But in learning pure intention seeds

of change are sown, producing a certainty
of our end point yielding to infinity –

a continuum with altered state where love
is the medium of existence, valued above

all other virtues. The greatest aspiration
simply to join this background radiation,

becoming a chorister in the eternal OM
that honours Life’s enigma: whose final sum

exceeds the logic of its constituent parts
by the measure hope expands each heart.

Where, in golden seam so deeply mined,
beyond what seems lies clarity of mind.

Thus in an old beginning, forever new,
we strive to recover what we always knew.

This ambiguity can art alone make real
and show each generation how to feel

reflexions not just of subjective truth
but waters of eternal life and youth.

Imagination

2009-06-17T19:18:00.000Z

Most people can't imagine what doesn't exist. Those who can are destined to be tormented by the difference.

Fortress of Illusion

2009-05-13T08:01:00.000Z

I recently completed the first piece of instrumental music which really expresses what I feel myself capable of. I wanted to write an orchestral piece, but realised that my chances of a performance were not high, so I decided to write it for two pianos instead. What is now the final movement was written first - which arose from experimenting with a perfect canon, and came q easily. I then decided to add an opening movement. It's called Crossing the Desert. That was a tremendous journey for me, where I encountered exactly the kind of attempts to derail my motivation that occur in the story I was illustrating. Altho I threw up my hands in despair many times, I returned and managed to wrestle it to a conclusion. which gave me a great feeling of self-worth.

Spring Awakening

2009-03-20T10:25:00.006Z

Up early this morning to walk dogs in the exquisite morning light. An errand took me near fields above a hanging wood above Chicksgrove I once visited a lot.
While the dogs scuttled about I was sadly reminded of a poem I wrote 10 years ago. Poor old Lakshme, now 14, runs about gamely, but has a slightly dicky back leg - tho it seems to grow stronger the longer she exercises.

But my reason for writing these reflexions here is that I stood for ages listening to the birdsong in the holly trees set around the edge of the hill like a fortress. At first I kept decoding their song into notation, quantizing it into an octave, because that's the way the mind /literacy works; but then I began to simply listen to the energy in it as praise, rejoicing in nothing more than being alive.

I felt tremendously sorry for people who cannot see the metaphysical coherence of creation, cannot see how this bird is unconsciously honouring the life-spirit in all matter, the same way that your or I do with our conscious intention.
It made me reflect that the tiresome words about God & Christ & Mohammed or whoever are mere quantizations in the infinite octave of reality. We humans must approximate these hugely entities into our little linguistic semitones because of the paucity of moral capacity to comprehend the vastness of the energy available to us.

The Luminous Darkness

2009-03-16T16:36:00.001Z

Into the echoing darkness I make my prayer,
knowing the dark itself is unanswerable.
All learned behaviour here’s unserviceable:
nakedness alone reveals what’s there.

The darkness that surrounds us is the fear
of ultimate non-existence: thus like child
with candle challenging the west wind wild
we can be nothing other than what appears.

Each black sun is a time of revelation
wherein we touch primordial power: the night
where, after wrestling with angels, light
brings permanent scarring bound up with transformation.

It's not enough to glimpse this mighty force,
we have to clasp its alienation
and wrestle with the pain of penetration
until we integrate the altered discourse.

Only afterwards we see the gift:
the pain arising from tectonic pressure
as old perspectives die to yield a fresher
deeper, larger, more abundant heart shift.

Gong

2009-03-02T10:15:00.001Z

The chinese word means 'true tone' and denotes a sound whose authenticity makes it a tonic or grounding note. The issue in life is not merely to find one's authentic note, but to play it at the exact juncture where it fits with the spirit ensemble, and with an appropriate timbre so that it creates an organic whole with the world's gamelan.

Letter to a student

2009-03-01T10:48:00.000Z

Anyone who follows a creative path knows these times of stress.
You simply have to trust your inner life dynamic – whatever name you choose to give it – for it is throu these times of stress that you grow and mature spiritually, and ultimately come into your true nature. Suffering comes into our lives because that is the mechanism by which we are changed and deepened as individuals. In the process what we discover is that individually we do not control the bigger picture, but need to collaborate with this ‘inner life dynamic’ in order to reach a position where our impulses, our heredity and the needs of others can combine to create a beneficial interaction. Only when we reach that position can we give fully what others can receive fully.
Everyone experiences these things, and always has done since the dawn of consciousness. What distinguishes the dedicated artist, and indeed any human committed to their own growth, is their willingness to allow themselves to be transformed by the experience and to incorporate the lessons so that their lives become richer and more multi-dimensional.

New Studio

2009-01-24T19:15:00.000Z

It's been some time since I posted here, partly because I've been preoccupied getting my new studio finished. The building began by my moving out of my old studio in July, and I finally moved back in on 9th January. It has been tremendously disruptive to getting any creative work done, as there have been continuous interruptions from builders & other tradesmen with legitimate enquiries, & things I've needed to chase up. But now it's all over & I am beginning to inhabit the space ~ and. I hope, to begin a new chapter in my life.

Trust in that of God within you.

2008-12-04T17:38:00.000Z

The anguish, also, is god –
    the desire for transcendence.
The search for unity
    of experience
links to the universal
    evolutionary
process of environ-
    mental adptation.
To each the choice of path:
    spirituality
or materialism?
    (The world needs both.)
But for the spirit-led
    life becomes
a constant alembic of learning,
    where we are heated
to burn away impurity,
    distilling the spirit
of transformation, whose ultimate
    goal isn't seen
in physical existence.

    Here my dear mother
claps her hands with joy.
    On earth she suffered
ending her days in pain:
    yet now she shines,
part of the constellation
    of love upholding
all material existence.
    The confusion
that was hers was mine:
    and now I share
in her clarity.
    What was physical
slowly burnt away
    leaving her essence.

So the life dynamic
    within each
spurs or dulls the evo-
    lutionary process.
If all the universe
    is one organic
whole, then every part’s
    contained within
a single entity.
    Thus we see
that the identity
    of All is One –
and One comprises All.
    Yet the harmonic
of the One transcends
    the All, a sublime
melody arcing above
    the orchestra,
defining all the music-
    making below it.
Within this ensemble
    discord and its
resolution are the
    light and shade
which give existence form:
    a little suffering
gives richness to delight.
    A night of anguish,
that final stepping stone
    to morning joy.
The cosmos within which
    we live and breathe
reveals an underlying
    intelligence,
surpassing human concepts
    of rationality –
as a great composer’s
    inspired designs
create the experiences
    enjoyed by millions,
with life far beyond
    their creator’s death.

Without the eye of faith
    noone can see
the ultimate destination
    of anyonelse’s
life trajectory.
    All that matters
is that we walk our own
    true path.
Sometimes that involves
    a walk in darkness.
Remember, the height of the building
    has to be matched
by the depth of its
    dark foundations.
Trust the architect
    who formed the world
to prepare the ideal fit
    for your contribution
to humanity
    now and forever.

When is a poem?

2008-11-20T12:07:00.008Z

If a circle is not closed, what is it?
What is roundness when it is irregular?

There is always a gap between what we see and what we can describe.

Composing is wrestling what I hear onto paper –
with a similar gap. And into it flood my demons,
the voices that tell me I'm no good:
that the attempt to communicate is hopeless:
that what I write is, in any case, irrelevant.
In essence, that I'm a nowhere man,
making nowhere songs for nobody.

My creative powers are thus like a millimetric sperm
swimming on the world's egg, looking for an opening –
both aware that for fertilisation a loss of self-possession is required.
The intimacy of the process matched only by its impersonality.

My mission, which I chose to accept before I had any idea how hard it was to be,
to bring a certain vibration of spirit into the world,
a spiritual hum /om if you like – whose defining quality
lies in its unique apropriety to its environment and time.

Each room has a sympathetic resonant frequency.
Sounding the space requires that we identify it
and then glory cascades from the ceiling,
the walls disappear and we are in faery land.
So it is with humanity.
On hearing the right note we become our true selves,
and the barriers to all our possibilities disappear.
(Oh dear, how much the Judaeo-Christian concept of sin has to answer for!)

The challenge in each moment to Be Here Now –
when we would rather be anywherelse:
the past: the future: with someonelse:
anywhere but Here. Now.
And into this solitary unaloness we cram
the radio. the ipod, the committee meeting,
shopping – you name it.
Anything to be a busy body.
It's like living next to a spring
but drinking only bottled water.

The only thing that makes sense of life's chaos
is if we allow its spiritual harmonic to emerge
and attune to that note, realising its chord in our lives.
To find the sweet spot where everything makes sense,
and all our possible dreams come true in living reality
we need to study exactly where we are now.
The freeze frame - one 25th of a second.
There! That's it. Now I am truly present.

The challenge: can we unfreeze that frame
and live in the present 1500 times a minute,
90,000 times an hour?
Of course not. It doesnt work like that:
we have to take the dynamic of motion for granted,
allowing key frames to inform us
and trusting the bits in between.

Yet as an orchestra must tune to a common A,
so we must find our note by listening both
to human and spirit beings, detecting
the common note with sharpness of ear
if we are to play our single gong stroke
right in the world's gamelan.

Intunity is the perpetual now.
Now is a perpetual intunity.

And this, this circularity, is it a poem?
If it is not, what is it?

Freedom

2008-11-06T09:16:00.001Z

Everywherelse I express myself conditionally, tailoring my utterances to the consciousness of my audience. Here alone I can express the fullness of my heart, my wild love of the being whose reality we tame with the word God. If there are gifts [charisma] then this is the greatest gift of all. This is the pearl without price. I am always looking for ways to bring this feeling into the world, and my recent sense of frustration is that my efforts seem to have borne so little fruit.

In my own mind a perfect harmony exists between the concept of a divine parent and the birth of hir child into time & space to be a catalyst within the art-work that is created matter. And moreover that then s/he would leave behind a constant echo, a wavelength suspended like mist in a valley, to whose vibration people could then attune. That seems to me such a beautiful & precious idea.

I see no conflict between the grace offered by this Christian concept of the supreme creator's engagement with hir creation, and the vedantic idea of the archetypes of religious experience lying on a spectrum between Vishnu, the imaginative perception of an ethical spirituality, and Shiva, the appetite-driven celebration of the cyclical life-force discernible throuout nature. These seem to me an accurate metaphor for the territory.

In all of this I see the activities of a loving parent who watches from a distance at hir children's maturation, and who know that true adulthood can only emerge if they have the freedom to make their own mistakes. I discern someone who longs to say 'please ask me – involve me in your life – call on my experience to guide you.'

This gives me confidence in my own humble offerings. My job, as I see it, is simply to set down what my inner consciousness shows me. It pleases me when people find personal meaning in what I create, and therein I feel a privilege to be part Christ's constant rebirth in the world – offering people spiritualy context, a way of orienting their lives, recalibrating their psychic gyroscopes.

As a young person I had the scarring experience of finding that composing what came naturally to me was meaningless to those around me. I was thus given an aversion-therapy where the more I produced my own music, the less it meant to anyonelse. I therefore retreated into producing what was guaranteed acceptance – for to me freedom meant a black hole of emptiness.

But part of my journey since 1991 has been to find how to reconcile the inner bleakness of autonomous creativity with the richness I experience spiritually. As to what is forming within me, I know little until it appears.

Song: Forgive & Forget

2008-11-05T11:11:00.001Z

When you first start to walk the road, when you first start to roam,
you have no destination and no way home;
but as time and chance occur to each man,
so soon you develop some kind of a plan.
And as you grow wiser, and as you grow old,
you find time's a great healer, and so as you live
tho you cannot forget you may learn to forgive.

The hedges in autumn have a russety glow,
and the hedges in spring can be covered in snow;
but the hedges in summer are buried in rime,
for that is the season of rosemary & thyme –
and so make your hay in the good summertime,
for time's a great healer, and so as you live
tho you cannot forget you may learn to forgive.

So come you my dauters and take you good note,
you'll ne'er tell a man by the cut of his coat.
You must try them and test them, sure nothing's too hard,
for it's only by that means you see past their façade.
And maybe you'll love them, and maybe you won't;
but time's a great healer, and so as you live
tho you cannot forget you may learn to forgive.

Angels

2008-11-03T09:22:00.002Z

I make it hard for you, don’t I?
Headstrong, impetuous, ego-led!
How can you wrap your loving
wings are such as me?

And yet it is from you that I
crave protection from
my folly, crave to know
the beings who inform you.

I do not welcome crises –
save for one reason only –
the times of greatest stress
are times of greatest grace.

Just as birds delight us
in the physical world –
so your tribes and types surround us
metaphysically –

each with its natural song.
Instead of flashing wings of
iridescent colour,
we are visited by sudden acts of kindness,

moments of dazzling love,
synchronicity,
cooperation – soul-food
abundant everywhere.

”But fear closes the windows
of the heart throu which
we enter to delight you,
even in troubling times.

“Breathe in and affirm:
‘Every change I welcome
makes me more the being
my birth prepared me for.’”

Holy, loving, wholly-
loving emanations
of the cosmic psyche,
tell us the age-old message

again in modern terms.
Visit our mortal weakness
with your angel-song of
constancy and service.

Let its bubbling melody
open and lift our ears
to the plane of simple truth,
the natural evolution

where we become who we
truly are, spirit-born
offspring of a knowing,
known, unknowable parent.

Bidden or unbidden,
recognise your angels’
wing beat, accept protection
for your openness.

Arc

2008-10-29T19:37:00.002Z

In poems I record my passage across the trackless wastes
of night, where I receive such startling clarity –

as if the milky way were opened to invite me in,
and I, a child, enter Aladdin’s cave

where I am shown great wonders of the spirit that will not fit
into the two-dimensional suitcases

which language offers to convey experiences to others.
Noone knows I'm here or where I've been.

I feel a kinship with the madder Hebrew prophets, who dwelt
in deserts and lived on locusts and wild honey –

fierce and uncouth as they were, their inner ear was ever open.
So it was with early English hermits,

whose springside cells invited angels by their energy.
I do not know what all of this is ‘for’,

and yet I feel it charging some kind of cosmic battery.
In the silence of each vivid night

my voice projects across the void of time in ways it never
could with ideas tethered to modern age.

It's as if my task’s to walk the arc that travels outward
from our human certainties towards

divine uncertainty, where pregnant gods suspend the rules
and magic’s in the air. This glorious dance of

spirits, tho optically invisible, is joined by sacred
attunement to the subtle vibrations of light and joy.

It is a plane above the sphere of compromise that’s ruled
by non-materialistic reason, where

the laws of love create those self-refreshing structures which
in-form justice and truth and inner knowledge.

How easy in the night to know: how hard by day to do –
where perfect lines of thought must bend round others.

Voice is to audience, as language /image is to common sense:
melody to listeners, as genre to social tribe.

My task appears to be to smuggle out the sense I have of this
ultra-real world of spirit truth,

that it may flow like water where it will, and nourish those
who do not dam its purpose or dynamic.

The spirit speaks to all, but those with ears to hear are rare –
for most prefer to hear from human guides.

And so I make my mark on stones and trees with ill-formed tools,
not knowing whether what they signify

to me will have the same (or any) meaning to another.
Matching means to ends is a lifetime’s task.

How easy it would be if I were not constrained to bring
something of these precious gifts away with me.

In giving what I can to whom I may, I form another

link in the chain that stretches back to godhead.

Autumn Gold

2008-10-28T12:10:00.000Z

I stood in autumn fields
where great warm thighs of hills
rose between wooded cwms
like earth-bound venuses
inviting the dying sun god,

For once my heart and soul
were joined in perfect accord
by an intense silence,
as a growing hedgerow
yearns in the sunlight.

The breath of foraging dogs
the loudest sound, apart from a
wren singing its heart out
on a distant ash.
From whom this gift of peace?

Whom do I praise and thank
for such extravagant beauty?
Can this truly be
the product of a random
feckless evolution?

Or have we failed to see
the nature of a spirit
unifying the sleepy
butterfly, the ancient
oak, the ocean’s power,

the milky way, and us?

Thank you – Being – with all
my heart for the unique
privilege of being
present at this inter-
section of time and space,

What is my place?

2008-10-07T08:17:00.000Z

“Your place is not to go around doing things from your own initiative: it is to be in your place. There I can use you, nowherelse.”

Enantiodromia

2008-09-24T08:12:00.001Z

Enantiodromia is when something morphs into its opposite.

I was struck afresh by the way in which the credal churches, but specifically medieval catholicism under whose shadow we all suffer to a degree, have corrupted the quality moral 'freshness' they s/ought to preserve. Last Sunday on BBCr3 I listened to a Catholic priest droning on in some basilica about the virtues of St Francis, and his values of poverty etc – I simply didnt know how he had the nerve, surrounded by the panoply and choral pomp which is the diametric opposite of what Francis preached. But of course that is the 'trick' of religion: if you can get people to believe something which is manifestly incongruent then they have as much invested in maintaining that belief as those promoting it.

Today in my Bible reading project I reached the Beatitudes and the teaching that follows them, which ties in extremely well with also dipping into Rumi. What Christ actually said remains as powerful and radical and left field as Rumi – both are talking of a love of inner truth, of connection to spirit/God that cannot ever been taken for granted in the kind of 'fact of life on the ground' way that a building creates – let alone one administered by a bunch of men in nighties (no matter how well-meaning).

No wonder the reformers throuout the ages have wanted to blow it up and smash the very stones that they see as creating an obstacle to true faith – and yet of course the stones still stand and appear to a faithless age (perhaps faith is only ever seen in retrospect?) as synonymous with the very quality it obscures. And now we have a vast 'heritage industry' which cares nothing for what Christ or anyonelse said, but solely concerns itself with the preservation of monuments to a dead faith. What hope for the living?

Do It

2008-09-05T10:48:00.003Z

You are not alone:
draw on the love that surrounds you.

Invest in people, and love
will be your dividend.

You know what really matters:
do it with all your heart.

Noone is more important
than you in this plan I have

for bringing love into the world.
Simply go out there and do it.

Supreme Creative Energy

2008-08-29T13:25:00.000Z

Evolution is love in action.
Love is evolution in practice.

Thou

2008-08-28T08:11:00.001Z

To whom I cry I know not:
yet into that echoing dark
I raise my voice, asking
only for shelter against the
storm, and workman’s wages.

To whom I sing I know not:
yet my dancing heart
is fuller than a nest
of nightingangels
all the day long.

To whom I weep I know not:
yet my soul is sore
to see such cruelty,
such greed, such ignorance
of nature’s sacred laws.

To whom I plead I know not –
for justice, for respect
for all planetary life,
for compassionate restraint between nations
and for love between neibours.

O thou, thou listening space,
thou answer in the wind,
thou song in silence heard,
thou all-enclosing otherness,
honour my heart’s wishes.

Building

2008-08-19T15:48:00.005Z

It wasnt until last week that I realised what a responsibility it is to build a completely new space. On the R is a picture of my old studio. It was a fairly ramshackle affair, built on the site of a greenhouse, whose refurbishment had been kindly borne by a delightful elderly pupil about 10 years ago.

For a couple of years it has been clear that rebuilding would need to take place, as the poor insulation had already had already taken its toll on my piano. Here is a picture of the interior in 2002 with my sister and late mother.

Hitherto all Ive ever done in terms of building might best be called intelligent conversion. Recently I dawned on me that what I am doing here will stand as an objective statement of who I was in the same way as my music – more conspicuous, perhaps, for who knows what fate that will enjoy?

I relish the responsibility, while realising that here, as in so much else, what we put on display is not our conscious intention, but our subconscious value system. At this stage I am greatly concerned about cost, but the whole process has been a great opportunity to engage (with) the energy of my guide Sai Baba.

Amor & Psyche

2008-08-10T16:03:00.002Z

The Golden Ass of Apuleius is one of Marie-Louise von Franz's most insightful books. And in it her chapter explaining the tale of Amor & Psyche contains some of its finest passages.
p82
Love with its passion and pain becomes the urge toward individuation, which is why there is no real process of individuation without the experience of love, for love tortures and purifies the soul. Expressed differently, Eros presses the butterfly painfully against his chest, representing the soul being developed and tortured by the love god.
On one beautiful gem the goddess Psyche, with her hands behind her back, is being tied by the god to a column which ends in a sphere. One could say that this image expresses in a beautiful way the process of individuation. Eros tying Psyche to the column surmounted by a sphere, the symbol of totality which is realized by suffering. Sometimes one would like to run away from the person to whom one is tied, in order to run away from the dependence, but Eros forces us to become conscious through this tie. Love makes us dare everything and leads us thus to ourselves. Therefore one of Eros's main epithets, which he had in antiquity, was "purifier of the soul."
p90
What happens to the gods if this process of [incarnation] takes place? A relationship is never only a one-way thing, so the gods get pulled into the human realm and, in the counter-movement, the ego expands its conscious awareness. That is the process of the incarnation of a god. Actually … in the impulse towards individuation and integration [within a human individual] it is the god who wants to incarnate.
p107
[Eros] wakes up and gives her the greatest punishment this god can give: he leaves her. To be left by the god of love is really worse than anything else he could have done to her. Psyche now is completely in the dark, and now her real deeds begin with the long and agonizing search to find Eros again.
p113
… stages of unconscious harmony, like that in the story of Paradise, result in the stagnation of life, and naturally certain disharmonious or evil impulses are excluded.
Some people by a great mental and psychological effort will sacrifice the one pole of an essential conflict in the hope of establishing peace in their souls with the remainder. For instance, in the monastic life money and sex are cut out, and with them the source of innumerable conflicts, and by retiring from these difficulties the establishment of peace in the soul is sought. The whole Christian idea of inner peace is in this direction; that is, one first cuts out a certain aspect of evil which seems impossible to integrate, and then one tries artificially to establish harmony with the remainder. All over the world mankind has a tendency to go in this direction. It is probably inevitable, for one needs from time to time to be able to set aside an insoluble problem.
It is as though there were rest places where one has a moment of peace, though one has the dim feeling that the conflict is not solved and will reappear after a time. One can observe this in people who draw mandalas and in doing so leave a part outside. They put the dark things outside the border of the mandala and imagine that they have now reached a state of relative wholeness and totality. But in this way they exclude certain aspects, and they can be sure that this state will not last. Some of these left-out elements will break in and a new process of integration must begin.
At this point we have the essence of the whole novel, for all through it (though sometimes the author seems to be gripped by feeling) a mocking, skeptical tone creeps in, a devaluating judgment which works like the knife in Psyche's hand. When things go well, a devil whispers in our ears that it is "[only …]" a rational devaluation which destroys everything. In a woman it is generally the animus [inner masculine] who is the artist in this field, and in a man it is a certain aspect of the anima [inner feminine]. The more sensitive and delicate and untouchable a man's feeling is on one side, the more he tends to mock himself. The Swiss recognize this type of man in their poet Gottfried Keller, whose feeling, on the one side, was extremely delicate, while on the other he showed the typical mockery of an old bachelor. That was his defense against his own hypersensitivity.
p115
Venus then orders Psyche to sort out a quanity of different kinds of seeds during the night.
… this could have to do with the Eleusinian mysteries, for corn is the mystical substance which represents the mother goddess as the goddess of corn.
---
A chaotic host of seeds is, in a way, an image of the collective unconscious, which seems to be, at the same time, a single essence and a multiplicity of images and creative impulses. One could say that as long as the archetypes of the collective unconscious are not [activated] by a human being, they are not real. They only become a psychological reality if they are experienced by a human psyche. It is for this reason that the archetypes of the collective unconscious resemble a host of chaotically dormant 'seeds' inborn in every human being, which, if not activated throu contact with human consciousness, could … be regarded as nonexistent.
p116
In the tale Psyche cannot cope alone with the corn. But there is still something which can rescue her, for ants turn up and sort out the grain. The chaos of the unconscious always contains a relation to order as well. In talking about the unconscious one must always talk in paradoxes, and when we emphasize its chaotic aspect we know at the same time that the unconscious is not only chaos but it is also order. In the last analysis, only unconscious order can overcome unconscious disorder. Man cannot do anything but be attentive and make the utmost and, so to speak, hopeless effort, until order is established again by itself.
This is something which Christian theologians would call faith.
p118
So one can say that in the right way faith is a great achievement, or rather pistis; loyalty to the inner law. When this loyalty or feeling constellates, it calls forth the secret order which is the chaos of the unconscious.
---
Jung always said that truth does not speak with a loud voice. Its low but unsuppressible voice announces itself as a malaise, or a bad conscience, or whatever one may want to call it. Great quiet is needed in order to feel these small hints. When the unconscious begins to talk loudly and to manifest itself with car accidents and such happenings, then the situation is already very bad. But in the normal state it has been whispering softly for years, before the thunderclap comes …

Ray Wyre

2008-08-09T15:33:00.001Z

In terms of someone willing to engage with his own darkness and use it as a medium to help others negotiate with their demons, Ray Wyre deserves a permanent memorial. Which in a way he has - in hundreds of changed lives.

The article contains an interesting example of how the unenlightened unconscious operates. Despite Wyre's manifest success rate in non-reoffending, both his residential clinics closed due to local paedophobia. As a society we project all our hatred onto paedophiles - they are the scapegoat for everyonelse's issues with sexual boundaries - & yet when someone demonstrates an effective way of dealing with the 'evil' he receives little or no collective support.

The same thing happened with (Quaker) prison shrink Bob Johnson 10 years ago. Michael Howard & others simply buried him because his successful therapeutic regime at Parkhurst did not fit their political agenda.

We all have our own issues with 'what we can get our heads around' within ourselves. And hence the level of integration to which we are willing /feel safe to go. I heard Ray Wyre interviewed In The Psychiatrist's Chair, & what really imprest me was his talk of how he prepared spiritually before & after sessions, so that in it he could be completely open & nonjudgmental yet also detox himself afterwards so as neither to become corrupted nor lose his vulernability.

That I thought was one truly wise man. I honour his passing.

Direct pointing to reality

2008-08-09T15:13:00.002Z

Essentially the Jungian idea of wholeness /wellness /health /wholth expresses in psychological language what is also the philosophical substructure of all polytheistic traditions, namely that we become one by digesting & assimilating what is diverse – ie, that as we can accept antitheses (perceive the underlying unity of cognitive dissonances) we come to see the nature of existence.

On the inner path the reward for resolving one (existential) paradox is a bigger one(!)

One of our biggest hindrances to self-realisation /achievement of power-full integration is that we project those very hindrances onto an external reality – which /whom we suppose is itself the hindrance. Jung has a useful phrase 'the [personal] unconscious always first manifests in a hostile form.' IE, while our consciousness is a stranger to our unconscious it perceives the latter as something other: the more alienated we are from our true self, the more hostile we perceieve this otherness. Which explains Horror movies.

Part of the great game of a successful life is to engage with this inner otherness (which is sometimes called the shadow) so that by assimilating rather than rejecting what is unattractive about ourselves we actually release its inhibited power to integrate within the natural diversity of our personality.

Often when we achieve what we think of peace /stasis in life it is by blanking elements which disfigure our concept of it. IE by a philosophical trick we place them outside our charmed circle where all is light. Monotheists for instance think that by focusing exclusively on the 'saviour' they can consign all their unintegrated elements to a 'devil' for which /whom they do not have to take responsibility.

To achieve full personhood we have to acknowledge & accommodate within ourselves all that we dislike – so that we no longer have any illusions. To use an eco metaphor, we become our own compost. That way the flowers grower stronger and more vivid. In Von Franz's books she speaks of a recurrent experience as a therapist of finding that within every client there seems to be an inner otherness (manifesting particularly in dream) with whom the therapist can create the conditions for a self-healing dialog to take place, and that when this does it invariably produces a holistic self-realisation which Jungians call the [true] Self – but which in traditional language might be called the soul. Jungians call this journey individuation.

This is contemporary language for the nature of the perennial search for wisdom ['direct pointing to reality' as the Buddhists call it] which is embodied in every religious /philosophical tradition worth the name. Some people personalise this as G/god, others don't. Yet we can never achieve full inner awareness without the integration of the otherness-within-us. In other words the I (ego) has to explore, discover & befriend the not-I (id) so that we achieve a consciousness balanced between egoic awareness & intuitive 'alter-egoic' perception – & in the position we become equipt to unleash the magical powers entrusted to us. But, this is the fascinating double-lock on esoteric reality, they are only fully open to the human mind when the possessor of that mind has consciously & profoundly renounced the personal advantage that such power offers.

E Pluribus Unum

2008-08-03T08:48:00.003Z

'From many, unity.'

Nobody could have lived a more scattered, scatty life than I. Yet as I wandered /wondered throu the different rooms of my personality I had a single purpose. To uncover the Christ in my life. It was as if by visiting each person within me I was excavating an aspect of the whole, what the Vedas call purusha or fully-achieved human. I sought unity within the diversity of my experiences.

If we are not seeking a unified awareness then all the diversity we experience has no context. It's like sitting on a train & seeing an unfamiliar countryside flash past the windows. It may be pretty but we have no identification with it and it is ultimately meaning-less for us, the memory is quickly erased.

I had the experience of working with a group of voice hearers. Two things struck me: 1) was that many young poets & authors would have traded a limb to 'hear voices': 2) the patients were tormented by experiences which had neither meaning nor context for them. Why was that? Sadly because, as far as I could discover, not one of them had this essential impulse to seek unity or intunity (a word I have coined to indicate a state of inner harmony). Buffeted about as they were by the vagaries & diversity of life they could only see it as random and appeared to lack any sense of an underlying unity, let alone the impulse to rendezvous with it.

The challenge is to distil the essence of life's many flavours until one's sense of them becomes visible as a quintessence.

The enigma within the riddle

2008-07-09T14:19:00.003Z

Out of the chaos and muck order forms:
Out of randomness and misfortune fertility.

At the edge of society I clear a path,
but don't know where it could lead.
Following it, I come into my self, yet
my destination is anybody's guess.
I am drawn to it as to the distant
drumming by a waterfall.

Is this drumming
from a clearing in the land of the living
where families celebrate life's flow
and new partners find each other?
“I don't know what the ancients knew:
I only know what others know.”

Or is waterfall one of exquisite beauty
awaiting my solitary admiration –
a place apart for communion with spirits.
“I have no common knowledge:
yet am in tune with the ancients.”

Bringing together such temples in the jungle
and the wild celebration of being alive –
is the trick to be performed –
integrating the impulse to immortality
with the anarchic fullness of life.

If I express my heart I get no response.
I do not know whether people draw silent benefit,
or regard me as an idiot, not worth commenting?
It's safer to assume the second.

And so I make these public keys
to unlock whatever is hidden.
This dawn writing captures the life
which poetry distils, whose jewel is music
and whose children are my pupils.

In the midst of life ...

2008-07-09T14:12:00.003Z

It is in the times when I am most under pressure that I feel the sovereign grace of Sai Baba.
At the moment I am caught in a vexatious circle with my bank trying to remortgage in order to rebuild my studio. I do not know the outcome, but I do completely trust my spirit helpers, that they will produce the right result whatever that is. It's a rerun of what happened 14 years ago. Which of us hasn't learn the lesson in the interim?

What do we value?

2008-07-07T08:15:00.003Z

Looking at the billions spent on CERN researching the theology of quantum physics, reminds me of the jibe that there are 600 churches in New York City yet still noone knows the way to find their inner truth (/God).

The real question is 'what are we looking for?' If we think the missing element in our lives –the hunger to find meaning which we project onto some external entity– is to be found outside us then we will be looking for some 'god', or some external validation, to our inner anxiety.

If we were to remove the God-projection from our mental vocabulary, & start to think about contacting our inner 'live line' then we would start to ground ourselves in a reality that takes account of our true nature as the first dot on the paper from which all lines & designs must be drawn.

Life line

2008-07-02T07:33:00.003Z

The word god is like a deep jam jar. After humans have extracted the contents to suit their taste/s, it has been given to the dogs. They have licked almost all the remaining nourishment out of it, except for a tantalising patina at the bottom where their tongues can't reach.

How then to communicate this sense of an inner liveness, of an intunity to the wellsprings of existence which animals know, but humans have to (re-)discover? Looking at my dog, observing life-forms growing around and considering the unceasing flow of springs, makes me think that the best description of the liveness which humans can know throu union with the intuitive otherness that is integral to consciousness is to describe it as a live line or life line. It is the spiritual equivalent of erectile tissue which is aroused by certain configurations of stimuli.

I have been seeking an expressive but neutral word to make the 'idea' of god comprehensible & live line or life line seems to work well.

Messiaen & Ray Charles

2008-06-26T14:30:00.002Z

By the time I'd been at King's Canterbury a couple of years I had grown so alienated I'd retreated into my own world where I did little else except play the organ and occasionally get beaten for noncooperation. My active antipathy to sport meant that I was singled out for bullying in that hellish academy of barbarians.
Messiaen was my salvation. I had first encountered him throu Allan Wicks, who also taught me organ. All weekend long I'd practise on the crypt organ, and by the age of 15 I could play all Messiaen's then-published oeuvre.
I had evolved a burglary kit that included a cathedral key & a coat hanger to gain access to the main organ loft. Being insomniac, I would wait until everyone in my dorm was asleep and then leave by the fire exit from Meister Omers, adjacent to the Choir School /House, go to the cathedral & let rip for several hours. Amazingly, I was never challenged, and no enquiry was ever raised about the organ being played 'Phantom-like' at midnight.
I ran up awful music bills for my poor father at Forwoods. £60 a term when a term's boarding fees were only about £250. (Hard to believe now!) And he couldn't even pay that half the time. Psychologists will understand something of the (non-)relationship that this way of demanding my father's attention was intended to provoke. Unsuccessfully.

When I'd first begun to compose, around the age of 12, I received no encouragement. My voice /idiom developed spontaneously under the influence of Messiaen as I learnt to play his intensely mystical organ music. Therefore I had the youthful experience of finding that exposing what was intensely meaningful for me produced indifference in everyonelse, including my parents who probably thought that composition was a just phase I'd grow out of when I needed to get a job.
This brought me to a crisis, which was essentially one of my own authenticity /self-worth: the more I followed my calling, my creative daemon, the more isolated it made me. Since those sounds that seemed most real & vivid to me aroused to response, except embarrassment, where did reality lie? The final straw for me was when I could find noone at Kings, boy or master, willing to read throu Messiaen's La quattuour pour le fin du temps with me. I just thought 'well if I'm in a parallel universe' maybe there's another one I do belong in, and if it does Messiaen must be in it. So to Paris I prepared to go.
I knew my grandfather had taken out War Bonds in my name, and discovered they'd matured & could be cashed. So I did so during the holidays & returned to school with my passport in the Easter term 1963. I could speak intelligible french – about the only thing I learnt at Kings.
Having been to the Trinité twice to hear Messiaen improvise after High Mass -wonderfully- and then seen him descend from the organ loft into a small sea of fidgety organophiles I knew I should never be able to approach him. Who was I? A a kid on the edge of a breakdown with no credentials, nothing to offer, barely able to give an account of myself. How could tell him -in french- I needed him to save my life? And if my god were to spurn me I must necessarily embrace the devil of suicide with which I had flirted constantly for at least 3 years.

The end of it was, my money ran out and I returned to England with my tail between my legs - determined on one thing only, never to submit myself to the confederacy of dunces called education. Accordingly I started work at Gala Cosmetics as a sweeper. My salvation was to meet harpsichordist Jane Clark & her composer husband Stephen Dodgson, who took me into their home and made me into a musician and a human being.
But my time in Paris was productive in another way, for I saw Ray Charles on his first European tour. Never before had I seen this level of incandescence, and rarely have I encountered it since. Ray was so attuned to his music that as a performer he seemed to be without physical limits - pure spirit. Nothing I'd absorbed about ice-race spirituality at Canterbury prepared me for a sun-race spirituality that was earthy and vibrantly sexual. Achieving a spiritual fusion between these polar antitheses of musical being, the intensely literate and the intensely intuitive, has been guiding principle of my evolution as a composer, music producer and teacher – not a superficial idiomatic synthesis, but an exploration of the nature of the energy relationship between intentionality and sound.

Joyce Grenfell

2008-06-25T09:33:00.002Z

I saw an excellent doc on tv about Joyce Grenfell last Sat. What I found fascinating about seeing her from 20-80 was that in everything she did there was an inner truthfulness, an inspirational quality that was a testimony to her faith. She was never malicious, tho she could be acid enough to show she was well aware of the dark side, yet always chose the light. She probably felt her talents were trivial, but to my mind her memorial is not her work, it is that she was true to her Self. Apparently many pro actors denigrated her 'amateurism' - but actually that was pure jealousy because she had 'it' - that vestal quality that comes from ‘intunity’.

Where I vibe with Grenfell is that like her I was never ‘professionalised’ by the education industry. Therefore what I write I write because I feel it compellingly important. It is of course a source of intense frustration that it is totally unimportant to the world at large: but I've learnt to understand that spiritually. I am motivated by my faith in Christ, and therefore the soundworld I (wish to) evoke reflects that belief system. The rest of the world (largely) isn't & therefore doesn’t respond to the vibe I'm into. I have come to accept that my task is not to ‘be conformed’ to the world’s values, but to respond principally to the truth I sense within me.
On the whole subject of inspiration, see http://msteer.co.uk/analytical/creativoxtext.html

Interestingly, music seems to be the one area where faith persists in our faithless world. Messiaen remained an undeviatingly devout Christian, and it was the mystical integrity of his soundworld that first gave me hope when I was at my lowest and lostest. Charles Ives put up with ridicule, obscurity & never heard his music performed, yet is now regarded as the father of 20thC US music thanks to the evangelism of Lenny Bernstein. He was an intensely inner-led Christian – who used his prodigious creative energy to found what is now the worldwide pensions industry because of his compassion for the elderly poor. There are numerous others I could tell you of: Stravinsky was a sincere Russian Orthodox: Schoenberg an observant Jew. Contemporary UK composer Jonathan Harvey is a devout Buddhist despite being as experimental as all get-out. Tavener’s Greek Orthodox faith is doubtless known to you. Duke Ellington wrote only religious music at the end of his life. Funkmeister Herbie Hancock is a practising Buddhist. The list is far longer.
Often, it is the intensity of someone’s mystical inner sound world that makes hir unafraid to be experimental – because the integrity of that world is validated by the spirituality of their world-view.
We each of us have a path to tread; and the issue –for the composer as much as for each human– is not to achieve great things in the world’s eye, it is to behave with an integrity and vision that balances one’s inner truth with the greater truth as one sees it. And to leave the results to God. Despite the great joy of the relationships in my life, that inner personal walk has often been wearisome & unrewarding, but what has always guided & inspired me is the confidence of hearing the Saviour’s greeting: “well done, thou good and faithful servant; enter thou into thy rest.”

Everyone has cultural preferences based on their personal world overview. For some of the reasons why western musical history has evolved see http://msteer.co.uk/analytical/jmtimbre4.html. Suffice it to say there is always an intimate, if circuitous, link between a person’s ‘intentional proprioception’ [their (non/) belief system about how the world is] & their aesthetic engagement/s. The difference is our individual human identity: the harmonics of those differences create genres and styles according to the number of people who experience their place in the world similarly.
How much easier my life would be if I didn’t ‘hear’ things & didn’t feel obliged to ‘externalise’ my inner world … but how infinitely poorer. The prophet Jeremiah said much the same thing but, I would say from reading him recently, never reconciled within himself the anger he experienced at having his (divine) vision rejected! What I or any composer write/s is a ‘negotiation’ between a collective perception (genre /idiom /style) and a personal inner voice.
All my life I have experimented with bringing the popular and the esoteric, the sacred and the profane, together. After many failed attempts, I see my latest experiments bearing fruit, and still regard this as my sacred vocation to bridge those worlds – to reconnect people brought up in the trivialising environment of electronic culture to the timeless depths of historical cultural continuity, while at the same time providing a contact point for those who exist in those depths to gain access to the energy latent in the surface tensions of modern media.

Writing about this is my way of clarifying my own intentions, of articulating to myself what I need to do further to manifest this reality. Our power as artists is that we create the future (‘unacknowledged legislators’ & all that) – so anyone who seeks to be artistically-conscious is required to be clarify their intentions that they may be vessels for ‘what is of God’ to enter the human dimension. That’s all I've sought to d0: it doesn’t make sense to ‘the world’ because they're not looking for those values. But it’s been an amazingly improbable journey. I've kept a record of it here because, far as I have been from any kind of acceptance to date, I know how the story ends (as certainly as I know Christ is my saviour) and therefore I wish what occurred in my life to be a matter of record, so that other people 'undergoing' what I have may see how salvation comes from holding to faith not from conforming to prevailing trends: and obversely to make clear to those who judge from the surface of my music (when it is finally heard as I intend) that my life was smooth & light-filled, just how dark the journey really was.
There is profound insight into the psychology of 20thC European culture to be gained from Dreaming With Open Eyes by Michael Tucker. He depicts a mainstream European culture that had become sterile & formulaic by the time of WW1 being swept aside by a shamanic irruption of the collective unconscious that had been repressed by Christian & post-Christian orthodoxies – not necessarily rejecting them in essence, but certainly rejecting them in their existing form/s.
There is, and will always be, a tension between the rational world of science & social order and the inner anarchy of the creative subconscious. This was first exposed in the rise of the Gothic movement paralleling that of early-modern science. Today we feel it more acutely because, under the impact of science, as a culture we have lost the ability to see meta-physically or meta-phorically, and can only see literally. [Hence the furious battle between Creationists & Dawkins-ites!]

Getting to the point

2008-05-30T19:21:00.002Z

The main game of life needs to be finding our right relationship with the earth – which means finding both where /how we belong on earth but also where & with whom to make our stand – collectively & personally.
Our inner life dynamic & dreams guide us towards this – if we let them(!)
This process works best if we consciously unpack the content/s of our psyche & resolve its incongruities. Thus by encountering & attuning to our selves as creative artists we discover how to make a harmonic interaction with something within our subjectivity that is, if not objective, then at least carries within it an overtone or archetype of our true selves (regardless of whether this or we are constructive in attitude) that contributes a resonance to our work which then carries it beyond its immediate context.

Inspiration

2008-05-27T10:20:00.002Z

The way it works (best) for me is when ideas come in dreams or the half-awake lucidity that follows. From studying my dreams over the last 20 years, I've learnt never to second-guess this process. I simply write down whatever I'm shown. This gives the ideas both a clear feeling-tone & an integrity, from which I find it reasonably easy to transcribe or scale them up in a way that preserve their essence. It doesn't necessarily mean everything I write is wonderful, but I find the results have an owned quality to them which is different from the brain-spun work I did earlier in my life.

Even where they attract no external interest I feel I have obeyed George Fox's injunction 'to (ac)quit my soul' - which he meant in the sense that if we utter what is shown to us without fear or favour, then the reception of that utterance is not our responsibility. It rests with the Powers That Be as to whether it evokes a direct response, or whether our function is to contribute to some evolutionary process that we may not understand at all.

This concept is part of both Christian and Vedic thought. The former says 'Deo dat augmentum' - God gives the increase: our reward is to play our part, the nature of its fruitfulness is 'in the lap of the gods' (to borrow a pagan phrase). The Vedanta says that it is the prerogative of Vishnu /Krishna to reward or withold.

All that is important for us as humans is to be truthful to the inner dynamic. The more we sync to it, the more harmonic synchronicity it produces.

Mantra

2008-05-21T08:40:00.003Z

For years Ive been working with the mantra SamBhaVa. Those syllables came to me so long ago I don't even remember when, but probably more than 20 years ago – some time in the 90s. I certainly associate their reception with the inspiration of Sai Baba in my life at that time. And I continue to find it very heart-opening to chant them. 5 years ago I sensed a new one given to me.

The seed meaning of syllables is balance-devotional love-movement. That can be interpreted in several ways, but the one that spoke to me was the idea that the mantra's function was to 'balance the flow of love' in my life: ie, to help me get over the binge-bust responses of elation at times of inner connection and despair at its absence; and indeed to get over the idea of personal ownership of &/or identification with such emotions. One can argue whether it is the sole agency accomplishing this ;) but the fact that the chanter is constantly made mindful of the thought means that it percolates into hir wider consciousness.

Mantram (pl.) are very sacred, yet as intimate as a vest. (I was going to say 'pants' but you can see why I didnt!) In the Vedic tradition they are given by the guru /teacher to the chela /student as a uniquely personal gift. I was therefore suitably cautious about adopting SamBhaVa, yet it has served me well.

My adoption of another mantra came about in about 03 when I read Sogyal Rinpoche's Tibetan Book of Living & Dying. The founder of his Tibetan lineage was none other than Padma Sambhava, who gave his followers the mantra: Aum ah hum - vajra guru padma siddhi hum. Since then I have added that one. The meaning is eternal-I-am, diamond-teacher-consciousness-miraculous-am. IOW, the eternal is within me, educated by /to a shining & incisive consciousness I am /attract the miraculous.

Seemed good to me!

Going & Doing

2008-05-07T07:48:00.002Z

When I wake in the early hours I follow after my mind, as it emerges fresh from sleep. In these moments it is reborn each day, with a love/energy that springs from the stars. I listen to what my dreamworld is telling me; and if /when specific people appear present I engage with them throu prayer – respectfully holding them on the altar of my heart and invoking light in their lives.

So it is that I send you love from the profoundest part of my heart. I make no claim to understand exactly where you are in yourself, but I am familiar with the terrain your creative life is now traversing, and so my purpose in writing is to reassure you that you are held in love, and that the turning you took is correct (provided you persist), and that it will bring rewards.

The advice I offer from experience is that the way /path is itself the purpose of your journey, not the goal you aim for, important as that is to motivate your progression. For it is in following the path that transformation occurs, not in reaching the goal. The goal you do reach, will almost certainly not be the one you were aiming for – but will be a greater fulfilment than you could have dreamt.

What is it to be?

2008-04-22T10:01:00.001Z

We do not become truly human until we acknowledge the divine (undying) aspect of our personalities.

Finding your point of balance

2008-04-09T09:26:00.002Z

Yesterday I had a solo harpsichord concert in London, and been practising for 3 hours a day during the final month. To do so is so ridiculously uneconomic in relation to the fee that even the phrase ‘pay to play’ pales into irrelevance.

What then is the reward? I think it is the gain/s in focus & self-awareness (during the learning process) & in self-confidence (from successful performance) – which are like the payoff a sports person gets from reaching peak condition & then pushing themselves even further to achieve a personal best.

The important life lesson for kids in music is even more valuable than sport & it’s this: a personal best does not involve you winning or losing in relation to other people (thus it is without an emotional downside, given adequate preparation) – what it does do is to put you in touch with the bedrock of your own psyche & help you to decipher your personal hand-eye-brain coordinates & the illusions /cultural mythology of how we all see, hear & respond which form the delusions or programming which govern most people's perception.

Where music is unique among the arts is that, once you’ve mastered your craft sufficiently to be able to hear yourself objectively, the sound you make offers instant feedback to keep you centred in the experience itself, and because, when you succeed, it is auditorily gratifying. Thereby a virtuous circle is created which validates your ego, and so reinforces your self-worth. One of my arguments against exams is that this ‘affirmation of human uniqueness’ is such an important discovery for each and every person to make by some means in their life, and one whose importance so far transcends ‘piano’, that creating conditions where a particular type of human (to wit those with an aptitude for music) can begin this long slow self-circling is the most valuable thing a music teacher can offer pupils. It’s an infinitely subtle & on-going evolutionary process and to mislead students into believing that the purpose of acquiring musical skill is defined by what can be measured in exams, or even as a shortcut to applause, is completely to misinform them about the re-creational possibilities music offers for refreshing their inner world in adulthood.

If you know yourself only in terms of other people’s valuation, then your well-being remains dependent on the opinion of others: but if by engaging with the confluence between intention & execution (which making music demands) you come to discover where /how your personal physical and psychological truths interact, you are thus led towards your human uniqueness – and from this all that is best human achievement springs, for this gives the individual a fulcrum to move the mass.

Unpacking the Box

2008-03-27T07:47:00.004Z

I've come to believe that, aside from giving & receiving love, nothing we do during our time as human beings matters as much as our determination to open our hearts to identify with Life in its deepest sense – to tune our antennae to the vibe of coexistence with all life-forms on the planet.

This is impossible without a parallel journey into our own fear & darkness. The more we encounter & learn to love those aspects of our personality we would prefer to deny, the more this search for integration brings into a natural loving relationship with the world around us.

One of the goals of life must be fully to unpack our contents during our lifetime, so that we can leave the planet with no tasks left unfulfilled, no commissions undischarged, and no omissions un-made-up. Only then can we truly say that we have lived life to the full – for only then we done what we really came here for.

Until you allow yourself to fall (fall in love, fall into the hands of the living god) you cannot possibly know what great things are in store for you. Up until that point you believe that you (could) control your life – once you know you can't then the Great Dance can begin. Because our lives are subject to gravity we think that to lose control is to fall to destruction. It isn't. To fall apart is the beginning of being remade. It's the first step to learning that the conceptual world is not the whole of existence.

Let go & let God.

Go for Go(l)d

2008-02-26T07:14:00.003Z

If we worship (acknowledge with awe) what is totally within us, we are also worshipping (acknowledging with awe) what is totally without us. Thus, one side of reaching our fullest development as a creative human must involve developing our wonder /love /self-respect for our gifts, while the other is to develop wonder /love /respect for the unknowable otherness which is integral to such gifts.
This alone sharpens our wits to receive (or recognise) the higher levels of the basic skill-insights given by one's genetic heredity.
Learning to praise this Otherness is indispensible to growth – for it is in giving thanks (even for the little that we have) that we are given thanks. The praise /thanks mechanism is itself an aspect of the organic (yes, orgasmic) pulsing by which all things are conceived and ultimately born. It is our privilege as humans to interact consciously with this process, and we reach our highest evolution when we engage our will in discovering what the truth of this 'otherness' is /means in our lives.

Blessing 2 U O Lord who call me in the early hours.

Running away from school

2008-02-14T18:20:00.007Z

When I first began to compose, around the age of 12, I received no encouragement. Nevertheless, my voice /idiom developed spontaneously under the influence of Messiaen as I learnt to play his intensely mystical organ music. What I wrote, now lost, aroused no interest either among my peers or teachers, one of whom was Allan Wicks, the organist of Canterbury cathedral and Messiaen's principal British protagonist.
But for me it touched the core of my creative being – & therefore I had the youthful experience that exposing what had meaning for me produced indifference in everyone I knew – including my parents who probably thought that composition was another phase that I would grow out of. This was later to give me a serious compositional block, since the pain of the inability to communicate by means of my music created an effective aversion therapy! [In this picture taken during Choir School scout camp, I am parading beside Oz Clarke, now better known for his oenophilia.]
Eventually this brought me to a crisis, which was essentially a crisis of my own authenticity /self-worth: the more I followed my calling, my creative daemon, the more isolated it made me. Since those sounds that seemed most real & vivid to me aroused to response, except embarrassment, where did reality lie? I was already in a parallel universe with, apparently, no tangent to that of others.
I decided that the only person who could understand me was Messiaen himself; so to Paris I went. I think it was just after Easter term 1963. But then, so alienated did I feel, I dared not speak to him – for to meet rejection from my god would have spelt the extinction of my last remaining beacon of hope. And I couldn't risk that, by the same token that the rules of chess forbid exposing one's king to check. To hazard one's dominant principle-principal is to court annihilation.

Having been to the Trinité twice to hear Messiaen improvise after High Mass -wonderfully- and seen him descend from the organ loft into a small sea of fidgety organophiles I knew I should never be able to approach him. Who was I? A 16 yearold with no credentials, nothing to offer, and unable to give an account of myself. How could tell him -in french- I needed him to save my life? And if my god were to spurn me I must necessarily embrace the devil of suicide with which I had flirted constantly for at least 3 years.
The Australian concierge in the little hotel in the Rue Vaneau (7ème), where I stayed on the recommendation of someone I'd met on the boat train over, suggested I went to Brive la Gaillarde. So why not? There was nothing for me in Paris. 40 years later I felt a savage recognition reading Rilke's account of his experiences in Paris 60 years before mine. All that was light and warm in humanity was a closed book to me. A neat irony, then, to go to a place whose name spoke of gaiety. I wrote poetry there that still exists in some notebooks somewhere.
Eventually I ran out of road. I had no psychic energy to project my consciousness across the void towards that of other people, nor any experience that would predict success. After three and a half weeks I got in touch with my parents, & my father came out to see me.

We had one of the few times of closeness we were ever to enjoy. He was open to me as he was never to be again except when we came to bid farewell to my mother a week before her death. Sadly, it was a measure of his inability to see what I needed that he encouraged me to stay and find work. He meant well, to encourage my independence, but anyone with half an antenna could have seen I was incapable of fending for myself. I accompanied him back to Paris, half thinking to return, half simply wanting his company. The journey, for which we bought first class tickets thinking it would guarantee seats, not understanding the french reservation system, ate up nearly all my remaining funds, as Id bravely insisted on paying my own way. I was left without enough money to return to Brive, let alone to live on. My money would stretch only to a ticket to Orléans, which was not even on the mainline south.
Some memories have stuck with me from my chambre de mansarde (garret room) in the cheapest hotel I could find in Orléans under the distrustful eyes of the flophouse Madame as I awaited a remittance from my parents, which I was sore at having to request. Maybe the mordancy of these memories has stayed with me because of not having eaten for 3 days – seeing prosperous bourgeois avocats spilling out from the courthouse in search of a gallic lunch in the tree-lined cafés around the Palais de Justice, and my having NO idea what life would be like a member of a human race I thought I was never destined to join.
Another was walking aimlessly throu a fair, possibly that evening, under the dusty trees of the market place. I'd found a sou in my pocket & been able to purchase a chew, which served only to madden my hunger. I really didn't know how I could go on living under any circumstances, even with food inside me. The fair was truly charming in those days before amplification with real live accordionists & little bal musette cafés – that I couldn't afford to visit. At one of them a gaggle of jeunes mooched by counter including a really beautiful girl, perhaps no more than 2 years -yet a whole world- older than me, who was evidently bored with being the arm candy of some spotty hoodlum. She turned to follow me as I walked, her eyes a bridge to that other world which I had no idea how to cross.
No woman had ever paid that kind of attention to me, certainly not one with her credentials. I was shocked with delight, yet it only made my isolation more intense – what import could any contact between us possibly have?
The other experience which occupied those 5 hungry days was making friends with the organiste du choeur of Orléans cathedral. A lovely /lonely semi-alcoholic who lived in one room in 18thC squalor in an 18thC apartment house near the cathedral. He had once had a piece played on Radio France by Jean Françaix, & this was his sole topic of conversation! His job was to accompany the choir on the humble organ in the chancel. He had no contact with the titulaire, the capital O-Organist, who played the splendid Cavaillé-Colle grand orgues at the west end, whose duties were merely to play solo pieces at grand liturgical moments, and who disdained his earthly colleag (who had once had a piece played on Radio France by Jean Françaix)!

The end of it was, the money came, I went back to Brive, collected by belongings & came back to England with my tail between my legs.
What I believe sustained me throu this dark period, and indeed brought two remarkable people across my path, were the prayers of my paternal grandmother. My Granny 'Ginger' was a genuinely beautiful woman at every period of her life. Her wedding picture shows her with a butterfly on her hand: she told me it was a real butterfly which had flapt into the photographer's studio at the exact moment he was ready to snap, paused on her hand for the photo, & flown away. To a person with her faith, there was nothing remarkable about this - that was how miracles happened, just everyday occurrences, that we were to be truly grateful for, but not to get particularly excited about.
I've always felt that my meetings, not long after my return, with Jane Clark Dodgson and the other really significant person in helping me back to a halfway normal life, Roger Wild, the vicar whose organist I became at the age of 17, were due to my Granny upholding me in prayer.
Before taking the cloth, Roger had been MD of Wild Aero Engines, a small independent manufacturer with a history going back to Spitfire engines, and he had Lived with a capital L, before experiencing a christian conversion under Billy Graham, and gradually realising he had a vocation as a priest. He was a visionary man of god, who filled what had been an empty church by simply making a space where it was safe for people to find personal answers.

He later married Clancy and me; but was gathered to his fathers not long afterward.

Transcendence

2008-02-12T11:19:00.000Z

All true art is a gift to the world that is beyond price. Constantly, at least once a year, I play throu Bach's complete 48 preludes & fugues. It brings me infinite & instant 'transport'. Such a thing
is beyond value. It & much other music has, for centuries, been a free gift to tens of millions of musicians.

Nature is full of such gifts. We we are truly awed by the richness that surrounds us then we can begin, but only begin, to understand the true depth of love – & when we have begun to feel the constancy and omnipresence of this love we have begun, but only begun, the process of attuning ourselves to the creator-spirit.

To experience this shower of love, one must cease to conceptualise, to see(k) 'reasons'. Love is - and its heart lies in an invisible cavity between words & wordlessness. To find the way to this is to find not merely 'shower of love' but also the show-er of love. It is both the (self-)discovery and reflexion of a perception of that entity which we can only name 'otherness', the unnameable, the 'not-I /not-us' which nonetheless encompasses the ego/I/us of humanity.

A time to embrace

2008-02-10T09:31:00.000Z

What a privilege to wake and know that there is a power, a presence enveloping me. To say 'I can't believe my luck' would sum up my feelings. And yet what at last has come to me has been sought throu years of tears – pursued throu wilderness, flood and mud, over trackless wastes, across impassable glaciers, and beyond steep stony mountains. So in a way, the only aspect of 'luck' that comes into it, is the luck I invoked by my heartfelt search for meaning.

During years I could not find a friend I had only the love of my family to sustain me – and how rich that was. Only a very few other people even knew, let alone carred, that I was alive. Yet I felt /feel that the principal value in my time on earth was simply to be a witness to my own life – to make no assumptions about what should happen, but to record simply what I am shown, to accept being 'dumbed down' but to continue to testify even to dumbness and desolation. With the same attention I now record the pleroma, the sense of abundant life &/or stream of living water which now visits me.

I know I don't own this. It has been allowed me, as a harmonic is 'allowed' to a note when the correct physical laws are observed. And this is why the Beatitudes tell us we must hunger and thirst after righteousness. The Bible says 'seek and ye shall find'; but it might be better to express it as 'seek and ye shall be found.' What you thought you were looking for is not what will find you. The function of seeking is to open our selves to Life.

The next step is to trust (in) your inner-life dynamic, to believe that you do indeed contain the latent wisdom you now invoke. By trusting, we become trust-worthy; just as by loving we become love-able. By learning to walk straight in the darkness we attract the light we seek, and make ourselves worthy -indeed make ourselves value- that light, so that when it appears, in the fullness of time, we may handle it as we should. Imagine: if such a gift were given to the without suitable preparation would enlightenment result? The teaching of Maharishi (who died this week) detonated a consciousness-bomb in the 1960s: while a great number undoubtedly gained empowerment to pursue their enlightenment, many more entirely missed the point of departure and remained trapped in their earthbound conception/s.

How many wish to rise above the level of their earthbound neibours? How many wish to shed the veiling flesh and come to see with opened eyes the glorious spirit body each of us has, and to begin inhabiting it during their lifetime? It fascinates me how throuout history such wisdom constantly arises and is as constantly forgotten when fashions and meanings change, only to arise again in new forms in response to new situations and vocabularies.

I believe that Christ released into the atmosphere an original dynamic which can never be extinguished, despite the best efforts of his 'followers'(!) – yet I should not understand the half of his message without the illumination of his fellow light-worker Gautama Buddha or the perceptual-philosophical ground of Vedanta.

There are beautiful things happening all over the world right now. We can choose to side with them, or we can surrender ourselves to the embrace of chaos.

Love 1 - Love all

2008-01-29T08:46:00.000Z

The words are simple –
They always are –
Love … Give …
Love yourself: give to others.

The energy within the holy 1 transforms the world, person by person:
embrace that integrative energy.

Our main task as humans is to unpack the baggage we brought with us,
so that at the end we can fly away, free spirits, released from the weight of unresolved elements within ourselves, no longer attached to material reality.

Until then, dance.
Dance with all your heart.
Dance with every thing.
Make your world dance.

Peace at last

2008-01-20T11:10:00.000Z

This morning I felt absolutely resolved, as if the Promethean eagle had been given a day off from pecking out my liver. Two things have happened this week which have contributed to this.

One is that ColourMuse has finally gone live after a (re-)development phase that has lasted the best part of 5 months, during which I constantly believed it would be ready by the end of each of the intervening months(!) – which was an exquisite refinement of torture.

The other is that I visited the remarkable osteopath Clive Lindley-Jones for a second treatment, ostensibly for the RSI I have suffered from in my right arm for the best part of two decades. However CLJ's skills extend far beyond mere osteopathy. He also uses kinesiology and a range of other diagnostic tools to assist him in identifying weakness of muscle tone and points of inflammation or dis-ease. Even more remarkably, for a conventionally qualified practitioner, he sees the body in terms of its auric or electrical fields and fully recognises the validity of the ayurvedic system of chakras.

With extraordinary speed & professionalism CLJ was able to isolate certain 'culprit' muscles in the first session. In the second he gave me various conventional physical treatments, but it was the accompanying energy treatments involving the alignment of chakric extensions of my spine both above my head & below my sacrum which I could feel effecting a major change in my sense of physical integrity – ie, of being fully present in my body.

CLJ was frank from the beginning that he might not be able to restore full mobility to my right arm repetition since the problem was of such long standing – but I do feel I have at last met someone who is equipt with the extended range of skills & metaphysical perception necessary to treat the underlying causation.

I salute a maestro!

Time Changes

2008-01-08T09:58:00.000Z

So. I lie here at 0445, thinking about what may come.

After so many years during which I lay awake in the darkness, uncertain or dreadful of the future, it comes as a pleasant surprise to find myself looking forward with clarity and anticipation. In a few days ColourMuse will go live. and then I shall be starting to develop it internationally as a mainstream piano teaching method. Win /lose /draw, it can only add value to my life.

When I compare my emotions on the launch of this with how I was around the time I launched my last major enterprise (CataList magazine) 15 years ago I see the measure of how I've developed within myself in what I'm 'given' to write in these sattvic hours. 15 years ago I was, mercifully, able to access an inner wisdom which guided me [preserved here in the earlier postings of this blog] & kept me more or less sane in a crazy time.

I feel that I no longer see this natural wisdom, which we all have, as coming from outside me, but I feel as if I've managed to integrate it within my consciousness. Which isn't the same thing as claimed to be an enlightened or omniscient being! Yes, in a way there's a loss. The bell-like clarity I had has gone, replaced by a more pervasive sense of clarity. So that's a plus. What existed as 'skyborne' inspiration has entered the loam of my soul.

Now, when I pray to that luminously unknowable certainty whom I sense within/without me, I do so in the sense of having a conversation – not with the desperation of someone battering on Heaven's firmly barred gates!

BGG Ethics/Spirituality/Philosophy Field Resignation

2007-12-17T09:14:00.001Z

I've come to the conclusion it's time to turn my badge in for reasons
unconnected with the recent turmoil. For the past month I've been trying to
find someone who would be willing to take over the
Ethics/Spirituality/Philosophy Field - so far without success.

My reasons are 1) that this summer I intend to rebuild my studio (with
turf roof & local stone) & only have a two month window in the summer to get
this done, so would not be available if the BGG runs: 2)
http://www.colourmuse.com/index.php is nearly ready to go live - in which
I've invested a lorra money & a lorra lorra time, & I really have to focus
on making this a success because my teaching method is a mission to liberate
children from the horrors of exam-mania (as well as a pension, I wish): 3)
I've embarked on a large-scale composition project which will take me half a
year & mentally is simply not compatible with the amount of fiddly
administrative detail that Area Coordination demands.

Beyond this, I do also have to say that as the serious points I've made
do not appear to have been engaged with, let alone responded to, I have
little confidence that the BGG directors understand the issues of resource
& human management any better than the record shows they did formerly. I
would therefore find it hard to engage in planning a future event with any
faith that further misjudgments would not occur.

I am very torn in making this decision, because the BGG has been a large
part of my life during this decade. I want to pay tribute to EVERYone who
has been involved in making it happen, and happen so beautifully. I cannot
begin to express all that I've learnt from being permitted to be part of it.
Due to my anomalous background, I've never felt I belonged in any other
social grouping. Yet the BGG has felt more like home /family to me, & I've
taken fire from the sparks which I feel other kindling all around me.

Perhaps in the human condition we are all wayfarers huddling together
around a midwinter fire telling each other songs and jokes to keep the
darkness at bay, and therefore in the physical circumstances of each
Gathering we meet together in a uniquely honest way on the ground as human
beings, as well as on the ground of our common humanity?

Yet at the same time we are spirit, and we have the power to be other
than our physical surroundings - we HAVE the power to create the dawn, and
ultimately to BE our own high summer. And the Gathering is a forum where
others can experience that power.

We all know this is what the BGG is about, and it's why I'm sad that -as
so often in the history of the world- a bunch of visionaries have been
caught out by their failure to keep track of the mundane nittygritty. We're
not the first bunch of stargazers to land up to their necks in mud.

The art of successful tightrope walking demands constant readjustment to
keep one's balance. In cosmic terms, the greater the light, the greater the
shadow. This is where we fell down: we luxuriated in the light, and did not
wish to see /engage with the shadow. Having a rather devious scorpionic
mind, to which I owe my survival in a fairly harem-scarem life, I have on
several occasions seen the drop coming, where others have partied on into
oblivion. (Call it e.s.p. if you want!) But my warnings about what was
'unsustainable' here fell on deaf ears.

It's an un/fortunate feature of terrestrial life that that which aspires
to raise the condition of humankind is subjected to higher moral standards &
more arduous testing that that which has no aspiration. All wisdom
traditions agree that anyone who takes this path has to expect it - 'As gold
is tested in the fire, so those who are chosen are tested in the furnace of
humiliation' says the Book of Wisdom in the Bible. Or to put in the
vernacular 'if you aim to raise the common consciousness you can expect to
have the shit kicked out of you.'

Why? Because we cannot change anything effectively in our external
circumstances without first being willing to be changed ourselves, and then
that dynamic imparts itself to those around us - and so the psychic ripple
passes throu the 99 monkeys till it reaches the one who tips the balance.
Much that is ineffective in revolutionary politics stems from people using
campaigning for external change when they have not engaged with their own
inner process & motivation.

My great concern is that we who constitute the core of the BGG had
become lazy about maintaining that central dynamic. Our steering group
meetings tended to be mostly inward about ways & means, with very little
about external vision & strategy.

Maybe that will change, now that minds are focussed on the bullet loaded
in the rifle? I hope so. It's the mother of all wakeup calls.

The hardest thing for me to let go are the relationships, especially that of
the wonderful ESPf crew - a number of whom have been coming from Ireland at
their own expense each year. Not of course that I AM letting go of them
altogether, but my decision means that as the bonds loosen some
relationships will disintegrate.

I think the thing that has been the supreme achevement of the BGG thus
far has been to demonstrate to the world that human beings can and do
collaborate naturally without the need for rules and rigid structures to
force them to do it. From the afar you might think that when you're
collaborating in building a visionary community all would happen according
to some ideal: for me the grounding discovery has been that the personality
traits & communication glitches are as much part of 'paradise' as they are
of the quotidian world. What differs is the motiviation to expand our
psychic awareness of interdependence.

Nowherelse have I experienced a social event where the fertile or green
values of Eros (the intuitive /subjective) so successfully outweigh Logos
(the rational /objective) - which is what makes the BGG such a great
counter-balance to the toxically yang energy in society as a whole. Yet I do
believe that its very success is what has led to a corresponding IMbalance
in the BGG itself. And that is what I have endeavoured to draw attention to.

Here we manifest most clearly the interesting phenomenon that whatever
we do not resolve in our own lives we visit as a shadow on others. [Yes, I
own myself in this.] If we are private individuals this doesn't matter so
much, but when we have positions of governance it matters a hellova lot.
Whatever is unresolved in ourselves becomes the blind spot we manifest in
the judgments we make on behalf of our 'constituency'. [Think Bush /Blair:
war on Muslims]

IMO, what MUST happen now for the sake of the BGG's regeneration is to
find a working balance between a competent professional manager, paid a
respectful wage, and a board led by a chair who has the self-confidence not
try to act the MD as well. It's a tough call, but it's one that's got to be
made. If the flow of meddling and bad /muddled decisions that I've seen
during my involvement with the BGG is not eliminated, I don't see a future.

Knowing that I would resign, trying to find someone to take over, and
working out what to say to enthuse that person at such an uncertain time,
has been a weight on my mind. I do believe that the BGG has a great future
if it can struggle to resolve its collective shadow by engaging with, and
embracing, what it fears.

Accountancy & professional management are NOT the enemy of spontaneity,
if the right accountant and manager are chosen. Everything in the world
changes, and if we want to keep the freedom of the cultural renaissance of
the 1960s alive (& my life & art are dedicated to this) then we have to
accept that different times sometimes demand different means to generate the
former answers. Nothing stays the same. As the zeros get longer the system
of financial management has to come of age.

The quality and longevity of an organisation are best demonstrated in
its capacity to train the next generation to assume leadership, which
requires an exceptional degree of forebearance and generosity. My heartfelt
wish is that we, the BGG, should earn the trust and engagement of our kids.
For the future of our planet depends on passing on to them what we have
learnt in a form that is meaningful to them. Finding the forms which the
rising generation finds meaningful is not a straightforward matter, but we
collectively know more about it than most organisations.

We, the BGG, have a head & shoulders advantage over other 'institutions'
- don't blow it up in smoke. Be real, be grounded - we ARE stardust.

I shall of course collaborate with whatever decisions are made about the
ESP Field to ensure the best outcome for everyone.
Best wishes
Maxwell

The link between the Moslem & Christian worlds

2007-12-02T07:09:00.000Z

Sometimes you wait for years for an elucidation of certain mysteries. Corpus Alchemicum Arabicum: Book of the Explanation of the Symbols 'Kitab Hall Ar-Rumuz' by Muhammad Ibn Umail with Psychological Commentary by Marie-Louise Von Franz, translated & published by Theodor Abt, is that book.

I had always been convinced that there must be a link between the Sufism, the sacred geometry of the early gothic cathedrals, mediaeval alchemy the troubador movement and the enduring legend of the Holy Grail. The encyclopaedic mind of Marie-Louise von Franz alone had the wisdom & authority to demonstrate where the common factors lie.

I shall write more about this anon, but for now let this extract stand as an example of the link she traces between the pursuit of the alchemical transformation of matter /the self, and the Jungian ideas of the anima/animus as each person's transexual inner otherness.
From 9thC ascetic Ahmad ibn Abu al-Hawari: "In a dream I saw a maiden of the most perfect beauty, whose countenance shone with celestial splendour. To my asking 'whence comes that brilliance on thy face?' she replied 'dost thou remember that night spent in weeping (& devotion)?', I answered, and she said 'I took those tears of thine and with them anointed my face, since then it has shone in brilliance.'

What was I given to do - & did I do it?

2007-10-29T09:46:00.000Z

This title came to me as I walking my dogs recently. Am I in tune with the profound purposes for which I was given life? Am I clear what they are? To what extent am I accomplishing what it's my role to achieve?
In the daily plod it's hard to be sure whether the steps we take are carrying us towards our goal or away? For the path often twists and when we find ourselves not obviously proceeding in the direction we think we should be, it takes a lot of faith to maintain belief that it is our correct route – but OTOH if we're already lost, maybe better to backtrack immediately ...?
Here's what I think. The key lies in keeping your inner motivation to serve the light within you high and strong. If your heart burns with that love, then the light shines, and provided you ensure the link of faith keeps your inner & outer world real and grounded, you are on the right road, because that is itself the right road, and because it is what all the goals & vicissitudes are designed to teach.
That's where trust comes in. To know intellectually where you should be heading, or to have a plan, is the surest possible way to lose the way &/or the plot. It's that trust between your self and your 'inner otherness' that is itself the 'intunity' which we all seek throu external means. And yet the way to find it was always within, smaller than the eye of the needle, a whole world made small. The very greatest gift of all.
Sometimes we have to accept that we're simply called to walk in the dark, at such times the bible verse 'whatever thy hand findeth to do: do it with all thy might,' is appropriate. This concept is well rendered by John Updike in his poem Midpoint
"Cherish your work, take pleasure in your task,
For doing's the one reward a man dare ask."

Centring

2007-10-26T08:12:00.000Z

Each morning I have to recalibrate my senses and reset my emotional baseline to neutral, that is to some sense of contact with an ultimate reality which allows me to connect with /surrender to it – or else my monkey mind goes busily about its whirling way, progressively confabulating probabilities into a spiral of planning & projections. (This is of course useful in its place.)
It isn't always possible to centre, for a variety of reasons: I may be excited about busyness that lies ahead, I may have had dreams that I have been unable to process – or indeed may not be consciously aware of, yet which are strongly colouring my subconscious mindset – I may have heavy food or alcohol in my digestive system that is governing my mental process and preventing me achieving clarity.
I refer to these circ~s as spiritual weather: sometimes it's sunny: sometimes it's overcast: sometimes it's stormy. During the latter I repeat my mantra: 'Sai Ram', invoking Sai Baba, the figure from whom I have drawn most spiritual empowerment. (I do not see him as an individual, who is separate from or in opposition to other spiritual teachers – but rather as someone whose energies are most present for me, and who thus becomes a lens throu whom I see to the depths of truth at which all traditions converge.) I also find invoking him really works when I am sleepless – it's a great use of what o/wise is 'dead' time.
The joke about meditation that 'the first 20 years are the worst' is absolutely correct – but the real benefit of persisting is that you come to experience your inner world in all sorts of different circ~s, and thus are able to form an overview of the dimensions of that world. Over such a length of time you are pretty certain to have visited some of the more extreme corners of your psyche and meditation gives you a tool with which to observe yourself as you go throu different kinds of 'weather'.
The day on which I wrote this was one on which I found myself led to put forward a contentious proposal within a group – and that too provided fascinating opportunities for self-observation.

What are we?

2007-08-21T08:40:00.000Z

Humans must be the only animal that can change form –
Fearing impotence we become stamping elephants:
Protecting our young, crouching tigers:
In honest endeavour oxen:
In positions of power, donkeys:
Crazed by vanity we become moths bumping round an artificial globe of glamour,
blinded to that inner light which alone makes us fully human.

It's about time

2007-08-21T08:27:00.000Z

To adapt to a sick society
is to let the sickness enter
your very soul. And where then
is your budge point? Your alienation
is the only strength you have.
Use it like a lever to jemmy
open closed consciousness.
Challenge the prevailing certainties
with your uncertainty: question
what everyonelse thinks set in stone:
be the fly in the ointment, the ghost
at the banquet, the one who won't keep step
with the march toward the cliff edge.
So long as you don't sell out, the Power
That Is still has one in hir sleeping
army, one awaiting the call
to activation. And when you know
it's time to step outside your door
you'll be amazed to see the neibours
you thought indifferent emerging from theirs.
And so, at last, the revolution ...

Coherence

2007-07-11T18:24:00.000Z

The letters tumble off the page,
which becomes a vacuum,
and terror like a beast uncaged
prowls the white & glaring room.

Common meanings, held in place
by shared perception, disintegrate
when someone dies, and so the space
that’s left becomes an anarchic state.

My mother’s house contained her world,
all that she was therein exprest –
emptied of what she once had valued
it’s as if her life’s disperst,

her character obliterated –
surviving now in memory
alone, until we too, as fated,
leave the living family.

As each picture is removed
the dustlines left around the walls
leave only the ghost of love
echoing a deserted hall.

What is it lives within a space
and slowly dies as memory fades?
Where is the energy that can outpace
these implacable engulfing shades?

In music and spirituality
alike, it is the intensity
of creative clarity
that defines longevity.

Truly there is a narrow path
that leads across the formless waste
between the two nights till by the faith
we see the dawning of the day.

Meanings have to fall apart,
words collapse in anarchy,
for this is how we learn by heart
and come to understand the key.

The fusion of brain and heart and will
in service of a greater good
produces a result that still
cannot be linearly understood.

Logic is for human goals.
They who seek to penetrate
the riddle some call ‘god’ are souls
who learn how intimately Fate

appears a dominant force; yet each
by this is given a chance for learning
how to be open to what they search
appearing another way of seeing;

one in which their integration
allows for synchronicity
to demonstrate, in their creation,
how each must own complicity.

Thus this seems to be life’s riddle:
the skill with which we dance our jig
depends on how we hear the fiddle
that the mæstro plays. And that’s the gig!

Studying this phenomenon
the result with which I’m faced
is that coherence alone brings clarity
and clarity alone brings grace.

And grace alone can fly us throu
the dark night of disintegration
when meanings fail, and what seemed true
mocks all hope of a salvation.

This was my mother’s final journey.
We all who witnest her despair
knew the pain of her latter agony
and could only watch with prayer;

yet in that harsh ordeal by fire
in which all hope is burnt to dust
she never lost her heart’s desire
to see God’s love repay her trust.

So may she now be fathered and found,
at home, at rest, at peace; her pain
released, rewarded with the crown
which they who love till death can claim.

We can’t evade the ferryman
who carries all beyond his stream
yet if we travel light we can
o’erfly the Styx as in a dream.

Thus each can clearly look at death
yet not by death be seen. For this
we have to trust the power of breath
to be exactly present: Now is

Always – Eternity is Now.
This is what each sage has taught
to set the spirit free, and how
all may escape when caught.

All these enigmas crowd the rooms
my mother once inhabited;
vacant now, her power perfumes
the lives of all who visited.

Tho her house be empty, bared
for other occupants, she lives
behind my eyes, and I’m prepared
to keep her idealism alive.

A fond farewell and then we part.
All that was familiar gone,
yet each of us within our heart
carrying memories all life long.

Rebirth

2007-06-21T08:33:00.000Z

In a relationship with a parent
that doesn’t quite work we are constantly like
a mechanism that reaches a point
where another gear should engage …
It's like a design fault we carry around
and reproduce in later life.

The infant impulse is to blame,
to demand our unmet need;
but a mature perspective shows us
that such incongruity
makes a first-class tool for seeing
into the nature of life itself.

I kept Mama at bay because
her wish for a shared love deluged me,
drowning my young awareness in what
could have nurtured my growing life;
so that I became a body
sinking where I should have swum.

Here we see how karma works
over successive generations.
My mother looked for that great love,
that one enduring incandescence
which every woman craves and no man
ever truly understands –

she wanted especially to live throu me.
She did not see how the same boat
could not have rescued both of us.
I lit out and swam to shore.
but I'm not sure she ever did,
marooned at the mercy of the sea.

I've heard of a therapy in my dreams
where parents and children swim together
on the current of their eyes,
borne upstream on natural love
that comes when two are willing to
voyage on this waterless river.

With human eyes we could not do this,
but now I sense a dam of blessings
tower above me. Keeping focus
on her eyes I take a block
and all cascade around me like
heaven-scented butterflies.

The gift: to live within this state.
The challenge: to accept an angel
whose energies I so long rejected.

I find with delightful terror I’m still
alive! The wave broke over me
leaving a covering of stardust and rose petals.

Prayer

2007-06-06T07:41:00.000Z

Lord by your mercy
let me be her work.
Bring me to completion
as she would have wished …

throu her grace, a feather
on the breath of god,
yet held by gravity,
let me be spirit on earth.

May I know what you want
by what she inspires.
May my life express
the suddenness of joy.

Time for a new timetable,
created not by logic
but by feeling – a clock
whose hands are moved by love.

The morning after my mother’s funeral

Be

2007-06-06T07:39:00.000Z

Be

Breathe

Allow

Love

Inspire

Learn

Build

Fulfill

Complete

Smile

Share

Merge

The morning after my mother’s funeral

Sonnet on the morning of her funeral

2007-06-05T07:44:00.000Z

I have not lost a mother, but gained a guide.
Released from flesh, and all that that implies,
I feel her presence now – a joyful bride
entering the royal mansion of the skies.

What she most desired was to belong.
A simple soul, she wanted love too much
and had to live with loss, but it made her strong:
she felt no shame in making faith her crutch.

Where inspiration comes from noone knows:
it arises from a geology of the heart.
For me, in flesh a soil which blocked my flow
my mother, now in spirit, seems to impart
an upward passage throu which water goes …
and see, above, how all the fountains start!

Ave Maris Stella

2007-06-03T07:17:00.000Z

And so it's down to this:
from my mother I'd wanted
a sense of place in the world –
but this she couldn't give me,
never finding her own.

Now she's dead, I see
how what she gave me was
a 'bridged uncertainty',
an inchoate knowledge of
that complex emptiness

where arrival is departure,
(quantum meta-physics!)
the world of paradox
where, learning to be empty,
we discover fullness.

I cannot say how far
my mother finally got
along the swaying rope bridge
linking earth and sky
above the foaming rapids.

In one sense she was always
there – for even as her
frail and weary flesh
wavered each step across
the terrifying void

her soul shone, beckoning.
My mother's gift and challenge:
the journey I must complete,
that inner mystical union,
the arrival at my birth.

And so she's with me now.
Never an earthly guide,
yet now the stella polaris
which she sought herself
and so at last becomes.

The cord snaps

2007-05-23T10:04:00.000Z

We stood around the bed,
some listening,
some full of thought.
Another entered.
Greetings filled the space.

Procedures were uppermost
in people’s minds,
or at least that was
what was spoken.
I wanted to honour the moment

of a passing;
but all I could hear
was the sound of ties
snapping, the clicks
of an era ending.

It was as if
the fruit that had fallen to earth
now broke apart
allowing the seeds to find
their fate alone.

The gift in death

2007-05-21T08:05:00.000Z

The gift in death
is one of ultimate clarity.
All that obsesses us
in our humdrum lives abruptly
and permanently
reduced to extreme simplicity.

We are here, now,
alive, forever united in death –
that crystaline moment
when flesh & spirit separate:
each discrete path
released from its earthly mold.

The physical, visible:
the meta-physical seen only by
the inner eye.
The path that was trodden in life at last
made manifest:
earth-bound or sky-borne in destination.

A time of uniquely
valuable focus, an aquifer
feeding our well-spring,
tears arising from long-dry ducts,
burning to light
deep-buried truth of hopes and fears.

Cherishing
the bleakness is honouring the dead –
each special feeling
bringing us contact with our own truth.
Every heartbeat
proof that the dead are always with us –

birth & death
just marks on an eternal cycle,
weaving together
the seen & unseen worlds, each as
close to other
as blood to its surrounding tissue.