BIROCO.COM ~ A way to look at things

I’m forgetting you. But don’t forget me. Don’t forget me.

FEBRUARY 5, 2010

Feelings have a way of making their last dregs poignant. As if one is about to lose something important. But in a moment or two, you can no longer remember what was so important. Perhaps something truly important can be brought to life again, but more often than not it's a fire's embers blinking out and you know no-one will stoke it, no-one will get it going again, and you sit there watching it go out, and by morning it is dead. But for a while the still glowing orange contains all of it, dwindled, but all in one place because of that, maybe there is even enough water in a tear to put out what is left of it, should the two meet, but they don't meet, the tear just rolls down a cheek and the orange glows a little less bright, as if begging for a piece of fluff to flare up on. I don't know why I'm sadder at the thought of being forgotten than of forgetting. Perhaps because there is always something in me that can be re-ignited? Even if I forget. I steer close. I know I can't count on anything. And isn't it true that there is something false in these final feelings as they die? Or is that the next moment and the moment after that, when she is forgotten, seeping into the moment when she is still remembered? In the morning the fire will be dead. Strange though, there are things written, to her, that foresee this moment, and leave instructions. I leave trails everywhere I go, and then I begin to brush them out as I disappear. Instructions for how to find me when I am invisible, when I am gone. I foresee it all, I wrap it up in enigma. It is a way I can go completely when my heart wants to stay. I leave a little of myself behind when there is still hope. When the hope is gone I feel the calling again. It is a way I have of wrenching my heart out of my body dousing it with petrol and setting fire to it. I will not be held back. By anyone or anything. And for a while there are footprints left behind you can follow, but they fade away, maybe just at the point you think you're getting close to me, the moment of greatest hope after hopelessness, and then it is hopelessness again, but true hopelessness, clinging to nothing. I won't remember you. I won't think of you again after this night. If you try to come close to me I will stick a dagger in your heart. You will try to forget me as I have forgotten you. But you won't be able to. And do you want to know why that is? I will never tell you. You will guess, it's a curse, but the curse of love. I kill it in myself though. I shatter its chains. And, in time, you will say, 'That man, he was a magician, I still bear his scars, but I am happy to bear them, and, one day, I will meet him again. He will not recognise me, but I will recognise him. He gave me that much before he left.'

And in the morning the fire will be dead. There are more than enough tears to put it out already, but let it linger a little while longer. Here's a bit of fluff, a dry leaf, an old beetle desiccated on its back plucked from the dust, eat it up, be glad of it.

Goodbye sweetheart. This magick I pronounce irrevocable.

Back for Christmas

JANUARY 23, 2010

At Christmas I went for a walk along the towpath of the canal, a place I loved as a child. Looked beautiful in the snow. The canal was frozen over, you may even have been able to walk on it, I didn't try. Someone had chucked a can of blue paint onto the ice, the paint had splattered all across the surface as it would on a pavement, and the can was resting there with the necks of brown beer bottles freeze-framed bobbing out the ice at various angles. I stood there for some minutes thinking that was just marvellous, a work of art, that would sink when the warmer weather came sink down to join the old bedsteads and other crap chucked in the canal over the years.

It was twilight and I wondered where all the ducks and dirty swans and moorhens and coots had gone off to. I listened to a loud wren in a bush. I came off the towpath at the first exit to take the back streets back to the childhood home, part of my old journey home from school. I paused for a little while on the humpback bridge remembering a fight I had with a bully whose nose I bloodied whose blood puddled here and led off in little splashy defeated drips for days afterwards before it rained. I timed it well. Let him jab and insult me all up the road waiting until I had his back to the wall of the humpback bridge, when I handed my glasses to a passing girl and pounded him. He didn't know what hit him. He had a weak nose so when it burst and he became robin redbreast on his white shirt he looked the loser straight away.

I congratulated myself later in my bedroom for a successful strategy. The girl gave me my glasses back and I walked off as if nothing had happened. But I knew I'd be doing more of this. I was good at it. I enjoyed it. Every time it was strategy and speed. When they least expected it I'd suddenly decide to strike. After I'd disposed of a few in the same manner, others would try to get a rise out of me, see how close they could get. It wouldn't work. I let them do it, I let them think they'd beaten me, that I was scared of fighting back. But then I would strike. And it started here. I planned my strategy at the bottom of the road and said, if he's still doing it by the time we reach the top of the humpback bridge, then. He kept on, little jabs to the shoulder, name-calling. It was all in his hands.

Years ago. And I walked down the other side on the way to the childhood home, sloping icily, wondering if that girl I handed my glasses to was fat and ugly now, or still the girl of several hundred schoolboy wanks without result. Too much time on fighting, not enough on girls. Made up for it later. And I pass what used to be the fish and chip shop that's now a balti takeaway, and what used to be the sweet shop that's now a home for doddery old people sitting staring at the window as if it's the television with the sound turned down.

My Teach Yourself Karate book is still inside the hollowed-out encyclopedia in my kid's bookcase, a secret hiding place where I'd also keep black-and-white photographs of naked ladies torn out of old Health & Efficiency magazines found while ferking around in the loft looking for extra 00 gauge railway line in wicker hampers when my parents were out doing the shopping.

After tea of cake and trifle I sit down in the armchair out the back and watch five CSIs one after the other on Channel Five because there's nothing else to do but read or talk to mum about pain. The walnuts and brazils don't get cracked, the satsumas stay where they are. Framed photos on the sideboard present me through the strata of ex-girlfriends. At three in the morning I catch myself looking with renewed affection. And I find something to cry about, but it's grace with the angel wrapping his wings about me.

Two trips up town one before and one after Christmas to look at the sales, not wanting anything, just a slim nostalgia for the smell of boiled hotdog stands and Black Country dialect. The art gallery is closed. There are no shoes of any interest. W H Smiths full of tired hobby magazines for new enthusiasts, though I do see her latest work in a digital art magazine, she looks sexy in the photo, albeit taken in the new bloke's house drawing with the new bloke's pencils. Thought she might've rung, what with it being Christmas an'all. But appreciate the time to think nonetheless, the space, the difference.

One day all this childhood place will shrivel up, like a sheet of newspaper to draw the fire up the chimney. The tadpole brooks and creepy teachers, the wishes and hatreds, the desire to escape, it'll all shrivel up and fit into a handful of ash. And there won't be any more reason to go back there.

Fragment of conversation

JANUARY 22, 2010

'What you been doing since I last saw you?'

'Two years as a gravedigger five delivering bread.'

'Sounds good,' I said.

'Not when the lid came off the baby's coffin.'

'So how's delivering bread?'

'We don't go hungry for bread,' he said.

Inspiration

JANUARY 15, 2010

I'm having a personal Jean-Luc Godard season at the moment and recently watched Vivre sa vie (1962). Here's Anna Karina's great dance from it, and the equally fantastic dance from Bande à part (1964).

I joined the panel for last night's Strange Attractor Salon discussion on 'Mind, Art, and Magic', with Phil Baker, Blue Firth, and Robert Wallis, chaired by Mark Pilkington. Great night. The exhibition, which has four of my own paintings, continues until the end of the month at the Viktor Wynd Gallery (The Last Tuesday Society) at 11 Mare Street, Hackney, E8 4RP. Still more events to come.

Something else

JANUARY 11, 2010

I think I've always had a deep yearning for something else. I would give myself the space for it to come, and wait. When it came, I wanted something else. Or did it ever come? Sometimes I think I am still waiting. It is not that I am averse to doing things to speed up its arrival, it is more that I don't know what I should do. Meanwhile, I am aware that various things get done, which on occasion seem to be the very things I once wanted. But I am rarely satisfied, and when I am satisfied it is usually over something simple, such as the thickness of ice in my garden water tub, which won't seesaw down when I press my fingers on one side, and I stand there wondering just how thick it is, but not with enough curiosity to go and fetch a knife and begin freeing the block to examine it. The rain, or I should say, the sound of the rain, satisfies me a lot. But then the sense of wellbeing will snap and show me only a lack, and it is this lack I have made my koan, attempting to understand it.

When I wake up from perfectly contented sleep more often than I would like my first response to viewing the ceiling is, 'Oh no, this again, this coffin room.' And I cannot then shift that sensation save by rousing myself and getting up. I may, while brushing my teeth, hear the birds squabbling over my seed feeder outside and I stand on the bath to watch them through the slightly opened window, and I think to myself, 'That's a good thing I've done there, fed the birds for a few years now.' But then I clamber down and think, a whole day ahead, much the same: alone.

I can't remember when this stopped being something I wanted, I similarly can't remember whether it was something I ever wanted, though I suspect I chose it for some reason or other at some time or other. But it bores me much of the time now. Not all the time, but enough to think there must surely be something else I could do with my life. But I don't know what. So I use the great stretches of time alone to write, to think, to read. And sometimes it is satisfying and sometimes it is not. I used to think I understood something of life, but these days I'm not sure I understand anything of it at all. I am aware though that everything could probably be dropped, just like that, in an instant I mean, for the kind of breakthrough I have been looking for for a long time. I forget how long. I used to think I'd already found it, but obviously not. Or I lost it again.

There's not a lot of continuity between the days, for all they are much the same. My memory of the past is about two hours for much of the time. Excavated childhood experiences are fiction really. What happened this time last week is a real effort to recall, so I don't bother. It was probably much the same, unless I saw someone or some people. Actually, I did, now I come to think of it, it was a pleasant time. But it's gone, so it doesn't matter whether it was pleasant or not, save to remind me that there are some pleasant happy times. Of course there are, but I tend to concentrate on this koan called loss. But I don't know how much longer I will concentrate on it. I don't appear to have got anywhere with it. If anything, the loss has intensified.

I think I would like a change, I know I would like a change, and actually I am in the midst of change whether I like it or not, but I can't help feeling like a person with a sack over his head being driven to an unknown destination. So many things start well but never go anywhere, I noticed that quite a few years back, and I said to myself well then if that is the case then I will just take a look at that and see whether there is any peace of mind that doesn't rely on anything going anywhere. Well there is, it is that philosophy of life that says that the external world is just a merry-go-round in the head. All the same, more happiness seems to come from there, the big wide world, than the few rooms of dead-end pondering that just can't actually get to the benefit that must surely come from understanding.

Yet I also know that success must be quite close to failure, because so much has turned out to be an illusion, even the notion that any time at all has passed, or that I am a human being, or that I am even in a room, or cold, or withering away for lack of all things wonderful. So many times I just laugh, and see quite clearly that whatever it is that is bothering me is just not so. And I carry on living life like the snow slowly melting on my hedge, knowing, somehow, that if I want something lighter than the dark ponderous corridors then surely I just need to tinker about a bit in my brain until a light comes on, and I see it, some new way to go.

But I can't help wondering why I strayed a million years through such unsatisfying terrain, save that I was on a journey that required I pass through the multitude of human experience, for a reason that would come clear as I approached the ramparts of that place beyond the edge of the world, which was indeed something entirely in my head all along, and then, perhaps, I would find myself tumbling into some other experience, something I truly wanted, that I had carved in a myriad of scratch marks on the wall, that I had no other way of knowing what it was, save something defined as not this that gradually took the shape of something very simple to want, that seemed withheld, though it never was.

And then, the years spent in a fog might fade, bringing me to the realisation that I had done something after all, for all I was still cold and the snow was still melting on the hedge outside. But who can you explain this to when you can hardly explain it to yourself? The hope is that there is someone, because then I will no longer have to carry it, it will be a self-evident arrival, and then I will know why I could never settle for anything less, and why anything less could never settle for very long with me either. Always trudging on, getting colder and lonelier, yet somehow driven by a forgotten allegiance that simply prevented any happier resolve, not until, at least, one had reached … I cannot yet say.

Something simple, something charming, something that brings a smile to the face in recognition of it. Ah yes, that's it. Two paths joining in the middle of a vast wilderness, the strength of a growing movement, being ready at last. The first thing I will do is rest my head on her breasts and fall asleep, knowing that when I awake it will be in another life. This is no longer something to take for granted in lesser versions one after another hardly even beginning for all there was the seed of such promise, no, this is being drawn into it like a feather into a vortex, because she, like me, is ready for that now. Anything else would only be boring after coming this far.

Snow

JANUARY 6, 2010

It's like the whole country is sliding down a hill and landing in a heap and just not getting up.

The cat, asleep on the bed, his paw pads are very warm, like a person with warm hands, not so noticeable in the summer.

All questions address illusions

JANUARY 4, 2010

I can only write about what is on my mind. And at present the natural joy has soaked into the ground like a wine libation to untrustworthy gods that are only broken fragments of my self I indulge in the hope that I will lose myself in belief in them again as separate entities keen on overseeing my development. I would rather write about sweet girls and laughter, but instead my mind is laid out with numerous mousetraps for bad thoughts snapping shut all the time. The person I talk to in my head remains remarkably constant throughout this loneliness I used to see as a pleasant solitude, he says my current thoughts are evidence, should I need it, of great change, change that is incomplete. And so one endures the madhouse, possibly seeing it as the heave-ho period that precedes the destruction of a universe in which one finds oneself confined. But one cannot help thinking, at times, whether it is more than anyone should reasonably be expected to endure, whether to shut down this point of presence as something fouled. But then, there is still a little bit of curiosity in going forward, and what is suffering but an illusion one is still to master. You can know that much and yet still not be able to roll up space-time.

As I grow older, I find myself wanting the simple things that many who expend little effort on awareness have already got, that by some tragic oversight or bold plan I made no effort to get at all, simply accepting love, companionship, wellbeing, when they came, accepting equally their absence as par for the course I had set. I don't think the Everest of solitary existential exploration is seen as being very sexy, and even I am bored of it. These, perhaps, just a last few bloody knuckle-raps on the closed door before going to Plan B: giving in, with or without understanding of the folly my life has apparently become. There you see my greatest belief exposed naked, necessarily expressed in the negative: I do not believe my efforts have been worthless, I just simply do not know their worth. And I am not going to ask any more what the point is, because there doesn't appear to be one. And if there is, well it can come and knock on my door for a change. In this, away with everything! Don't even bother picking up the pieces, because this universe that has tested me so will soon be replaced. And these dying echoes can be rejected, just a last gasp of frustration in the face of the void, as one is reborn inside the body of one's true desire, as if it never had any difficulty about it, and if any bitterness remains you can be sure it is about to go, as creeping vines that cannot reach across the abyss content themselves with a slow decline over a precipitous drop, before they too come to a stop and just hang limply.

In retrospect, you can see it was meant to be funny. But roll on change, roll on that vision of the beautiful girl with short black hair I seem to know who lounges around in my head ripening with every shy glance into an actual person, one from the factory of images myself as everything that is says yes to, because it seems that is what I am supposed to do, hardly daring to admit a mirage to closer intimacy yet all the same going along with it. But first, before anything of that can manifest, flush away the previous love, the love seen through, the love almost twisted into hate, that will be love again, when let go of as a prospect once entertained. Because it is that stale reality that is the universe that must crumble. And, when all is said and done, it is not so hard to clap one's hands and have it be so, even if a thousand pretty little butterflies fall to the ground dead at once. Cut up their wings with scissors and put the pieces into your kaleidoscope. One day, you'll see a beautiful pattern that is the old love transformed, because we do want to know that she was beautiful, the one we thought was beautiful. And other bollocks we say to say what we can't find the words for, about which tears want to say more but cannot. At the end of everything, grace comes. It explains nothing, just wets the cheeks in cold runs. But still, it knows something, in its slipping-away glory.

Finding the right question

DECEMBER 22, 2009

I was watching Jean-Luc Godard's Une femme mariée (1964) when a man in the film asked a question:

How do I distinguish between the reality and the desire I have for it?

Sometimes you hear a question posed and realise it wipes away many questions you have that don't quite reach what you want to know and concentrates the yearning they represent into one focused expression of it.

But it remains a question. It means you know how to look at the problem you face now, rather than flailing with it. This is a question that can only have any meaning when desire is so strong it cannot contemplate the failure of such longing. Yet it knows that desire in itself is not strong enough to make the reality as it would like, is not even sure whether such a desire has been provoked because it is the future reality calling, effectively saying: 'Do you want this enough, are you willing to suffer for your wanting of it? Because if you want it that much then it's yours. But if you don't want it that much it will go away. Inevitably it will wither.'

This is an illusion, of course. Yet that's what it feels like. Any lessening of the desire seems like giving up, cutting off the connection between you and what you want to come about. It is love that fears non-reciprocation.

It is also the vitality of life. They say it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. This has to be right. But what does one do? How does one distinguish between the reality and the desire one has for it?

Teenagers and young adults rarely can. They must experience unrequited love. It is just part of the game of growing up. And there are old fools too. But how would a person who at least tries to be wise handle this one? It is too limiting to say they should cut off their desire, since how will they ever know whether the desire and the reality are twin-born? How will they discover whether desire ushers in reality, sometimes. Whether desire is the red carpet rolled out to meet an inevitable manifestation?

I think when one has that intensity of longing the best thing to do is to be conscientious about it. And modest, assuming nothing. This is the only way to stop illusion playing like mischievous fairies in your back yard. And to gradually watch, noting signs of movement before they have even begun to move, the seeds of events growing in the darkness of not really knowing, not for sure. And to take hope when there is hope to take, and to quietly celebrate when fears prove unfounded, until, one day, perhaps you are proved right to have dared to hold such a boiling cauldron of desire in your heart. And if the reality and the desire don't ultimately chink glasses together, maybe you weren't a fool, maybe your desire will prove fluid and exchange its image for a better image that does come forward, that does prove faithful to everything you thought life could and should be.

Some of my paintings in an exhibition

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

I intended to start up the journal again in the new year, but the fact that a few of my paintings will be in an exhibition in January at Viktor Wynd Fine Art, curated by Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor, prompts me to begin it now with that news. There are also some great panel discussions and other events.

The reason I intended to start up the journal again is because the first of a number of books I've been writing will at last be published next year by The Coronzon Press, so I intended to whip up interest and get back into the kind of post writing I used to do here. One exciting aspect of this publication project is that I have been making audio recordings of me reading bits and pieces from these new works and intend to get into podcasting, mainly on The Coronzon Press site (presently being redesigned, otherwise I'd provide a link) but maybe here too.

In other news, if you're a regular reader of the Yijing Dao site, which has been continuing during my journal hiatus, you will have seen that I'm attempting to gather a few people together to form a London I Ching Study Group. Slow so far, more interest being shown internationally via email, so it has not got going as yet, but the next Kindred Spirit magazine will carry a news item about it so that may attract some interest. But as my long-term study of the Yijing is ongoing such a group can in theory form in its own time, as it's not something I'm going to lose interest in. The envisaged form of such things has a habit of changing when you set things in motion, I find, so in time I expect it will find its shape if it is to gel.

While I'm here, I may as well point out Seb's blog Notes from the Noon of Life and mention that Gyrus's Dreamflesh blog and Jim's Quiet Road are going full-steam ahead.