And Not Need Names

And Not Need Names
(after Rilke)

The earthship won’t grow from our insolvent sudoku
Its dream is low-slung, driven underground;
The heart that beats red poetry in front of you
Knows silence as a crown yet to be found,
Yet to be released into the drought-lands
To sift and polish the golden sands.

Cynic eyes scorn the loss of morning
Turn their Janjaweed bitterness inside
In a smoke-gabled mansion of dis-ease,
Victims all of the stag’s yellow footprint
Delicately placed on the brow of the world.

Where exhaustion holds hands with its angel,
Where the tears flow in rainbow smears to
A dusty dead despairing land, soiling and ensouling,
Bringing salty rain to the thirsty husk of human brevity,
Where aching gusts of reiki rage up to scry television,
To fling its digital pulse back into the image-furnace
Back to the formless, nameless trough
The pinched chaetae of the possible
Worming towards ego
In service to heat,
Moistness,
A free
Life.


KH, 29th May 2006

The Rebirth of Orpheus

Behind the apparent conflicts and disturbances that populate our news media a greater theme is calling us.

A change in consciousness is being called for, we are all being asked to put away childish things and break the consensus trance that could lead us off a cliff.

The group think of standard Western discourse is now both so misguided and loud that it can seem impossible to pose a workable alternative.

But there is a path, and we must sing a different song. We must call the arts to our aid.

When the perilous journey of Jason and his Argonauts was to take them on a route past the rocks of Sirenum Scopuli, Jason called on the aid of the bard Orpheus. When the Argo came to those rocks and the Sirens began their sensuous, alluring singing - singing that had drawn so many to their deaths there, wrecked and ravaged, broken by the very promises that attracted them – Orpheus took up his lyre and he played music more beautifully than that of the Sirens, thus drowning out their inviting but deadly song.

In a recent interview the author Brian Goodwin tries to answer the question of how the ideas necessary to achieving planetary transformation can be best communicated, and he suggests a primacy for the “rebirth of Orpheus”. While the political realm must play an important role, the very system of politics requires a transformation itself, and maybe art can help there too.

So let us call now on the Orpheus of the Argo lest we have later to journey with him into the underworld to recover what we have lost.

A tree rose up – O apogee of rising!
Now Orpheus sings, all hearing’s tallest tree.
And nothing speaks but signals in the silence,
new births and transformations, come to be
Rainer Maria Rilke

(Rilke translated by Stephen Cohn, Sonnets to Orpheus with Letters to a Young Poet (Carcanet 2000) )

James Piers Taylor

IMAGES: Orpheus - unknown artist from vase c.440 BC, Sirens in the Water by Arthur Rackham

The Duende of the World

We have said that the duende likes the edge, the wound and approaches places where the forms unite in a yearning greater than their visible expressions
Federico Garcia Lorca.

How do we sit and be before this world?

Daedalus in his prison is contemplating the forms of nature to rise himself above the walls to creative freedom in thrall to the Muse.

How do we act and give blood to this world?

His son, the child of his mind, is reaching for the hand of the Angel that Rilke warned us is terrible - this false whitening before the dominions of the World.

Breugel shows us that the earth does not give a shit for another fallen Angel.

Are we now Daedulus before this made world, this spectacle? Can we free ourselves from the prison of our energy crisis, the great extinctions that loom like dark Rorschach nightmares on the horizon? Do we try to hitch a lift on the waxy truth of an Angel's wing?

Angel and Muse come from outside: the Angel gives light and the Muse gives shape
the Duende, though, must be awakened in the deepest dwellings of blood
Federico Garcia Lorca.


This murdered voice staining our blood like glass from beyond the unmarked grave. This midnight flute firing, this shocked truth bullet-breaking in the crystal skull, the fragments the hologram of a life lived in the dust, the ash of a million fires, the fire of a million lives ended in the dust, mixed with topaz, smeared onto time, as art lives, he lived, by lining the avenues with embers.

This voice crying; an ancient child crying before the wound we were never meant to heal, for it is the duende of the world. It is Rubedo, the blood that survived the burning of our final hope.

(translations of Lorca by Merryn Williams, Selected Poems (Bloodaxe 1992) )

Mark Jones

Image:Icarus and Daedalus by Charles Paul Landon (1799).

What Red is Not

It is not false whitening - a distortion of the Albedo phase that precedes the Reddening. False whitening is found in the ascendancy of the heroic ego: the stance of impure purity when the ego splits from its own underbelly, from the body and the subconscious, and holds forth, crusader-like, for an ideal, a flag for which it fights.

I capture an element of this process in my poem Standard Candles in which the idea of relatively constant stellar luminosity which is used by astrophysicists to measure the rate of expansion of the Cosmos is contrasted with the flickering lights of those Souls lost in the holocaust:

Standard Candles

Six million flames
Held toward the myth of the superman

By the steadfastness of these lights
Let us measure our progress

The sons of light burned only
The mothers of the world

If we do not watch out
Our purity will kill us all


Our will to power as a species finds a willing comrade in the (alchemically speaking) false ascendancy of the heroic ego. Our global approach to conflict resolution has not as yet revealed that we can negotiate the necessary whitening that preludes the enlivening power of the Rubedo.

In true whitening the Soul is able to open its imaginal gateways to the questing ego and the ego is able to find solace in the reflected light of truth found in those white gardens. Instead of believing in its own myth the ego is able to gain experience of being held, like the Moon is held, by the light of a spiritual Sun, reflected in the waters. Thus is Silver made.

Without this silver sword, forged in the Albedo reflections, the passions of the Rubedo are simply fanaticism, the projection of our inner hell on to others and to the world. With this silver sword the blood of the reddening is cut from our own heart to feed the variegated lotus of our own belief in life, in the Soul of the World. From this blood the non-local, eternally hopeful message of the Rosy Cross can grow.

Mark Jones

IMAGE: Two Candles by Gerhard Richter (1980).

Mercurius

Mercurius

While Pharaoh bullshits and the locusts descend
Your Jesus biscuits work to fatten my gland
No more the partisan, aloof as a shoe
I chew my mind out and present it to You.

The drills of February, the broccoli towers
Lard for the cardinals and butter for whores
They asked for Gurdjieff but I’ll have to do
I bake a braincake and consume it with You.

You are the undertow, you are and you’re not;
Your name I still don’t know, my name I forgot
But making names is just a phase we go through
Building a bridge across the chasm of You.

In secret chambers where the pyramids pulse
We lovers moan to watch the salmon convulse
My love reveals her Rosicrucian tattoo
I bite the fucker loose and feed it to You.

Pundits of Moloch bid Aquarius rise
I serve the princess with the fire-engine eyes
She grinds my clock to trill a manic ‘Cuckoo!’
Big hand and little hand united in You.

Unkindly planets clog the shithole of Space
Their Nazi orbits rub God’s pain in my face
Float like a Bodhisattva, sting like a Jew
Here in the human realm we know only You.

I swerve to execute a droll pirouette
You are the memory I dream to forget
The warped mandala everyone must construe
Duplex from centre to circumference: You.

August Mercurius, how brazen your play
No oxymoron can contain you, they say
Yet circumstance confirms you as my guru, so
I kill my son and drag a blessing from You.

Outside the mooers rock lobotomy chic
No hieros gamos, baby, maybe next week
This time I’ve bitten off more than I can chew
I chew my mind out and present it to You.

Jon Hellier

Names to Conjure With

Neruda
Garcia Lorca
Bonnefoy
Char
Whitman
Michaux
Rilke
Novalis
St John of the Cross
Rumi
Hafiz
Leonard Cohen
Yeats
Blake
Ginsberg
Bob Dylan
Vernon Watkins
Robert Anton Wilson
Hakim Bey
Noam Chomsky
Irvin Yalom
James Hillman
Normandi Ellis
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Marion Woodman
Marie Louise von Franz
Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig
Guy Debord
Jeff Green
Ken Wilber
Joseph Campbell
David Loy
Monica Sjoo
Naomi Weisstein
Sylvia Brinton Pereira
Gaston Bachelard
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos (Zapatistas)
Jon Savage
Lester Bangs
Johnny Rotten
Bill Hicks
Barbara Hand Clow
Norman O Brown
Thomas Moore
Fremion
Raoul Vaneigem
Ernest Becker
Alice Miller
Cecil Collins
Ceri Richards
David Jones
Alex Grey
Jack Yeats
Van Gogh
Dali
Nagarjuna
Lama Yeshe
Thich Nhat Hanh
Z'ev Bin Shimon Halevi
Will Parfitt
William Bloom & Sabrina Dearborn
Caitlin & John Matthews
Noel Cobb (Sphinx)
Kathleen Raine (Temenos)
Joseph "Beautiful Painted Arrow" Rael
Eileen Caddy (Findhorn)
Rob Preece
Adam Maclean
Rudolf Steiner
Kabir Helminski
AA Alvez
Chogyam Trungpa
Marko Pogacnik
Immanuel Swedenborg
Jung
Freud
Adler
Fromm
John Welwood
John Rowan
Martin Buber
Maslow
Frankl
Piaget
Hans Ten Dam
Milton Erikson
Moshe Feldenkrais
Gerda Boyessen
Fritz Perls
Andrea Olsen
Stan Grof
Bert Hellinger
Usui Sensei
Ida Rolf
Don Hanlon Johnson
Elizabeth Behnke
Clyde Ford
Johansson & Kurtz
Wilhelm Reich
Janov
Freud
Joan Chodorow
Alexander Cohen
Mother Meera
Sri Aurobindo
Ramana Maharshi
Da Free John

Keith Hackwood

The Vessel

Leukosis

The saltflats of my cheeks
are taut with dessication
and no one knows the
oceans that have evaporated there

briney waters outside of history
unknown to record
and anyone but myself
locked in the memory of minerals and skin

channels and rivulets
scored deep beneath the surface
the hidden wounds
etched inward by my tears

James Piers Taylor