This Little Piggy Went To Market…

Wearing his Ghandi shield, warding off the necrotic waft of the cleaver poised always above.
He knew, in his piggy heart, that the state has a monopoly on violence, but envisioned himself more in the role of midwife to emergent organic order than pinko terrorist threat. Which was a shame, since from the Market’s perspective our juvenile porcine hero amounted only to value as dead-weight, as uncovered meat shaved from the solitary screaming eye under a concrete hijab, fit for feeding to hairless gluebags in surplus period wehrmacht togs. In such bifurcations dreams are unmade, pig-blood is checked out for redness, the sluices of civilization are switched; piggy brains become deterministic, synchronic flows are disallowed on hygiene grounds, your attention becomes a toxic mimic of the love our piglet-mirror thought he served, now braised on a pyre of old orders, laced with the finest pressings of totalitarian agriculture. In the land of sugar mountains, wine lakes, wheat alps and milk seas, the little piggies learned to starve and spew. In the land of imagination the fences grow taller and more razor-like than ever.

Kh
26.10.06



IMAGE: Superschwein from Bayer 'Animal Health Division'

Mason of Dreams

Mason of dreams
fashions houses from the sand
reads impermanence in the tide
and lives in the highest dunes
waiting for the great wave
that will pull up the skirt of the sea
revealing in one terminal glimpse
the smooth white flesh of the seabed
before mantis striking the land
and severing his head clean off.

James Piers Taylor, 24th October 2006, in transit London-Newport


IMAGE: Apocalypse Wave (2002) by Paul Cumes

Patripsychosis

He came for us out of the biotypes
Pituitary hero in his own time
Telling his six thousand year old story
Withering alternatives to fiction

He prizes power and straight lines
ID cards and Big Pharma -
Cares nothing for the paradoxical frog, goes on
Playing smackyface with mother nature

Till the white-coated biostitutes make utterance –
‘It cannot be proven that fish need water to live’, or
Crawl under TB blankets with the spinning gossip of nurses;
Woe betide the wobbegong, the boomslang reels in pain

Our latter-day sainted Zeus will make you all produce
Acres of abstract code to steer his missile algebra
Through stratospheres of ambivalence, never other than up
Staring at the day world through tomorrows techno-mask

All I ever wanted was a pangolin as compadré
But horny scales are no defence from star wars armoured
Death drills, rolling up has no effect on bulldozer will
- ask the forest, ask the seabed, ask the brindled voice in your head

Equids served his bow-strung lust, roaming the steppes in genocide
Like the umbrella mouthed gulper, like thalidomide rex
All mouth and teeth and trousers, arms like Francis Bacon
Sentencing you to instant coma, down comes the spider

To live on inside you, infanticidally
Owning your breakfast cerebellum
Owing him tokens of vellum – paid to be
King for the day on the day you die



Kh
24.10.06


IMAGE: Patriarchy Says: "Everything As It Is... " Via F.L.A.M.E.

Become Shamen V

for David Greenslade

Upending the thunder
and letting it roll again
cherished by the clouds
the rain cwching his toes.

A child of the hedgerows
bent chwith
walking through the nursery
seeds cascading from broken pockets

I can wear the nimbus
and the curlaw
as easy as the sun
this raiment is familiar

There are more pockets
in these clothes
than stitches

Rolls his blanket out
upon the ground
sits barefoot
strides rolled up
sets his moustache alight.

James Piers Taylor, 20th October 2006, London

IMAGE: Cernunnos depicted on the Gundestrup Cauldron (1st Century B.C.), held by the Danish Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen.

Become Shamen IV

for Dave Bailey

All night long
all day
watch the sun rise twice a day
or not all.

Hold the flannel to your forehead
through your fever
replenish it with water
from the dish by your bedside.

I hear the wind too,
there

it travels between the boards

and there

the door lifts and falls
in its embrace

But the wind will still
the night will pass
I carry this candle
and it will not be extinguished.

James Piers Taylor, 19th October 2006, London

IMAGE: Ganjin Statue at the Toshodaiji Temple, Nara, Japan (2002) from the series Pictures from the Surface of the Earth by Wim Wenders

Become Shamen III

for Jon Hellier

Who wouldn’t want to be a trouble maker?

Walk in my footprints,
if you must,
but the sea will
wash it all away
behind us
in any case.

I can write on the glass
in my own juices
and when the sun strikes the window
we’ll stink out our message to the world.

Who can resist my painted features
when they split to issue
chanson
fable
the very moment a heart broke?

James Piers Taylor, 18th October 2006, London

IMAGE: McDonald's Hamburgers invading Japan Geisha and Tattooed Woman (1975) by Masami Teraoka.

Become Shamen II

for Keith Hackwood

The flesh falls off
tightens round the bone
like sun dried wet leather
the brain pulls back the eyes
into the skull.

Spindly fingers of an outstretched hand
are lengthened by a span of uncut nail
pointing skyward
pointing to the ground.

A man stands completely
within his own shadow
a silent wind picks up his hair
quiet aurora to his head

many questions are asked
and he nods his acquiescence
to the presenting issue

yes

he says

there is still time for this

James Piers Taylor, 18th October 2006, London


IMAGE: Mitsukini Defying the Skeleton Spectre (c.1845) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Phantom Exuberance

"The only limits to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today"
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Now Newton’s cradle is ten Earth’s wide
here is the news:

Colliding Ricochet Impacts Slope Gaia-ward
At The Speed Of Optimism – but
look to our rocketry, sophisticating fireworks
raining seeds of justice from pearl skies;
or look at the pyramid builders
from whom we learned all we knew
until the black-hatted necromancers stoked
the engines of lust with mummies
co-opting the ghost slaves to our project -
so today you have eighty or an hundred,
I have more being higher on the pyramid,
next year some of us will have a thousand
think of the progress in that statistic!

None of which stopped the cerebral haemorrhage
seeking out the cripple-king,
the brain trust trussed up in barb-mired knots
dead meat, solar battery, fleshy node
of some future device lost in a blank
acreage at the back of the white mind
awaiting techno-fix, Walt Disney’s cadaverous grin

America swollen to 300 million
but broken since 1939 -
spun language tails into edges
faced with a margin, a limit
the eruption of a minute into
fragmentation shards,
shrapnel of capital’s incendiary whorl
the paint is flaking on that varnished world
the rust that won’t sleep also will not vote
for tomorrow's doubts, or today's demise


kh
17.10.06

IMAGE: Gesit - from Matschbogs

Become Shamen

for Mark Jones

When my friends grow old
they will become shamen
let their diaries breathe
sheela na gigging
or waving their penises in the air.

It will all be desert then.

Their faces blue with the woad of tears
and those who died early
will hang around as ghosts.

Their eyes upon each other
wishing they had spoken earlier
hands on shoulders
and legs giving way.


James Piers Taylor, 16th October 2006


IMAGE: Soyun - a 100 year old Mongolian Shaman featured in the radio documentary The Face of the Shaman

A Walk in the Woods

It's my birthday - 35 years old, half way through if we take the Biblical three score years and ten to be our guide (I do not) - making me officially middle aged by Christian reckoning. There are an increasing number of gray hairs in my beard, I may choose to consider these as evidence of increased sagacity.

35 is a 7 year, another point in what some read as important lunar cycles - positing transformation points at ages of 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42 etc. Is this just arbitrary? Whenever we reach a point of reflection in our life, it is easy to seek out some exterior system that might validate our introspection: 28-30 - its Saturn Return; 33 - the age Jesus achieved Christhood, or Gautama Buddhahood; 35 - what can I find? seven year lunar cycles... anything else?

In Dane Rudhyar's reading of the words of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, the age of 35 is one of the seed points of the cycle of life, the Summer point of fecundation.

At the point of mid-life the conscious self of man, like Dante, explores his depths and his heights and joins the other self that pours down from the heart of Light.
(A Philosophy of Operative Wholeness (1930))

Well maybe Dane. But the evocation of Dante brings a more familiar feeling to mind, the opening tercet in Longfellow's translation of the Divine Comedy:

MIDWAY upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Recognising that these are some of the most quoted lines in Western literature however, I am removed slightly from my solipsism and forced to reflect on the universality of the experience referred to. Again I question - was there ever this straight-forward path? are we any more lost at mid-life than we are at any other time? All the previous moments of confusion wash back in, the tidal pulse of life's questioning. Jung saw the analytic process as not a linear path, 'the straightforward pathway', but a circular or cyclical journey, and so too our personal meditations on ourselves and the world.


In Jung's work on alchemy and the process of individuation, he writes of the movement from the albedo to the rubedo in a way that may remind us of the Rudhyar lines quoted above:

The growing redness (rubedo) which now follows demotes an increase of warmth and light coming from the sun, consciousness. This corresponds to the increasing participation of consciousness, which now begins to react emotionally to the contents produced by the unconscious.
(Mysterium Coniunctionis (1956))

So is this mid-life madness, more Rubedo? At first the process of integration is fiery conflict - this confusion. But amidst all this conflict and confusion there is soul-making, there is the work. Of course this work is always ongoing, and of course it cycles around again and again - but cycles are not necessarily repetitions. This cycling may be, to take another archetypal image, a spiral or spirals - like Dante we spin through our infernos, purgatories, paradises - repeating patterns but not exiting from the spirals as we were when we entered them, who we were when we entered them.

When we leave the path, lose ourselves in the woods, appear to be going around in circles – perhaps this is not such a bad thing. When we try and force shape and understanding on our experience, try and systemise ourselves, adjust to the “normal”, straight forward, socially acceptable routes mapped out for us - we may miss our own instinctual recognition of our needs, of the way forward for us. So let’s end today’s walk with Dante again:

As the geometrician, who endeavours
To square the circle, and discovers not,
By taking thought, the principle he wants,

Even such was I at that new apparition;
I wished to see how the image to the circle
Conformed itself, and how it there finds place;

But my own wings were not enough for this,
Had it not been that then my mind there smote
A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.

Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:
But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,

The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

James Piers Taylor, 12th October 2006, London


IMAGES: Dante Astray in the Dusky Wood (1861) by Gustave Doré; The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone (1771) by Joseph Wright.

Engaged Realism - Godzilla Vs Bambi

The father of permaculture, Bill Mollison, once said that the whole of human experience could be summed up in the phrase ‘think right or you’re dead’. He extrapolated from this survivors’ view of human history, the deductions that i) we have survived thus far and ii) we therefore have the experience, the nous, and the genetic predisposition to ‘right think’ our way beyond an increasingly bleak present. If we place these comments alongside the contemporary anthropological position, (that civilization has a pathological affect on human experience, not to mention the biosphere and all life within it, and that prior to civilizational modes of settlement and domestication of flora and fauna humanity existed in prevailingly healthy dynamic equilibrium with natural systems) we come to see that, as large mammals of the Pleistocene era, we human beings are embedded in a life-way that the vast majority of us have become profoundly ignorant about. And in our ignorance and traumatic ‘fall’ into a plethora of divisive ‘doings’ (e.g. the division of labour, within and without and the irredeemable alienation that flows thereafter) we have become creatures of ecocidal, destructive and life-fearing action. We have lost our being.

Yourmindfire wrote in his recent piece ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it…’ on this very site, of ways in which we can begin to engage with the scale and urgency of the issues we face as a species – and rightly drew our attention to many awareness-raising media and many first actions we can take. The purpose of this piece is to build on that lead, to begin the process of descent into the shadow territory of our slavery, our rage and our culpability – beyond which lie the farther shores of reclaiming our capacity to ‘right think’ and therefore survive and flourish. I contend that without this dimension, we are as good as lost – since any action we take will be partial, occluded, implicitly attached to fundamentally traumatised states – and therefore we will be acting from a hell-state, lashing out or rushing to fix surfaces, while diversities and depths unknown to us are ignored or even pushed extinct.

This piece is a candle flame in a cave – casting very little light, perhaps revealing the shudder of shapes that will terrify and haunt our imaginations, or awaken the primal fears in our bellies. It could blow out at any moment leaving us stranded in absolute darkness, perhaps on precipitous paths or in treacherous flooded sumps. There are no guarantees, no insurance policies, no–one to sue or complain to when reality bites. And the cave is no stranger to us either – once we lived here contentedly, sharing the space with the great bear and other teachers whom once we respected, and now we murder or exhibit as lifeboat gene-stocks in urban zoos. Older than Plato’s cave, deeper than Lascaux, further back than the petroglyphs and ochre marks can take us – we are beyond participation mystique, beyond our own ego-centred need for plastic convenience and motorway freedom – confronting our own innermost outer edge, between a world of death and a world of the potential of life. Back before evolution’s wrong turning.

Then suddenly there’s a film projected on the cave wall, who knows where its coming from – maybe your pineal gland, or that glowing crystalline intelligence way above our heads – a faun is eating green shoots of lush grass, while a huge and menacing shadow claw hovers ever closer to his beautiful innocent head. At this point the sage voice of Mollison cuts in again:

..most people are still irresponsible . . . and seem to be dangerously shortsighted when it comes to their ability to perceive the immutable barriers that we're bound to hit sooner or later. It's like that classic film short Godzilla vs. Bambi, you know. Humankind is flitting about carelessly — like the innocent Bambi — consuming enormous amounts of energy with no thought for the future. But Godzilla — those inescapable laws of nature — is breathing down Bambi's neck . . . the shadow of a giant foot, of the great paw that will soon come down, hovers over him..

This is the cave we sat in for decades with eyes closed, in deep meditation – whilst outside the world woke up to the wheel, and the plough, and the metallurgy of power, the 747 and every silicone hardware hi-tech breakthrough steam-driven nuclear techno-fix saviour that inhuman floridly stunted imaginations could concoct. Much beauty, much labour saving, a slice of ‘easier’ living, a growing distance from self and other, from all and nature, losing the rainforest for the sake of a flat-pack wardrobe. But in the cave there is still hope – as the Tibetan experience hints…

Tibet was very backwards and very violent until about thirteen hundred years ago. It was a violent, conquest-oriented place, actually. They had big dynasties and empires and harassed their neighbors and looted and pillaged and behaved just like we do now. This movement of inner revolution and nonviolence sprang up most powerfully in India, which is where the Buddha chose to be reborn in this cycle of history. It was a society that centralized enlightenment and made that the highest aim...

(Robert Thurman)

Something about an inner technology, humanely scaled, whether brought forth by Buddhas or preached by Christs gifted by Elders or whispered in scriptures of leaf and soil, these are reconnective clues – priest-surmounting, liberatory in their clearest expression – a doctrine of the cosmic child, the Age of Horus foretold by Crowley now arising in the folds of the medulla-cave-mind. ‘You’ve gotta get in to get out’ as Peter Gabriel told us, whilst animistically shamanising the daffodil.


The flame is flickering, I’m losing you, losing it – this was always the risk. A few last words before the light goes completely. Mollison moans again –

...there are two very distinct ways of looking at the land. One is to ask, "What can I demand this land to do?" That viewpoint — which is the prevailing philosophy of commercial agriculture — can lead only to the use of force on the fragile soil. A permaculturist asks instead, "What does this land have to give me?" Anyone who asks that question will naturally work in harmony with the earth to produce a sustained ecology...

And if we can’t love the soil, how can we love ourselves and our interdependence with the web of all earthly life? The soil that has no priest, no doctor, no ‘democratically elected’ representative to represent its interests, (just a growing army of ‘soil scientists’ to demarcate and document its passing) and yet without whom we all perish, taking a billion year branch of the life-journey with us, as we neuter the limb of life’s tree through our Bambi-like attachments to the image of our own specialness.

Or another drift of light across the dumbshow lens –

...the only sane response to the insanity of our postindustrial age is to gather together a few friends and commence to build the alternative, on a philosophy of individual responsibility for community survival...

But what? I’m not sure – I’m no expert, I don’t have the skills – I have no experience… I know these defences, they are also mine. But listen, who does it fall to to create the causes for survival and the thriving of life? Only You. And me. A final muttering from the troglodyte Mollison sheds a last candle daub on the matter, asked of responses to permaculture’s initial vision he responds:

Well, I can only say that there was a stunned silence at first, since the concepts were seen as being terribly radical. The ideas were intuitively accepted very quickly, though, by nonprofessorial people. And many of the enthusiastic responses came from women. In fact, 70 to 80% of the letters I now receive come from women . . . they seem to see immediately that we've got something here. On the other hand, scientists — male or female — don't see, mainly because they're used to teaching a passive and nonreactive system. Such individuals don't teach reactivity, and they don't practice activity. Everything is on the blackboard, and nothing is in the garden.

The light dies, darkness reclaims space – back where we came in – but are your eyes open or shut? Are we real enough yet? Can we please think right now?

KH
10.10.06

All Bill Mollison quotes from 'Permaculture - Ecosystems for the Future', interview in Mother Earth News (Issue #66 - November/December 1980).

Robert Thurman quote from 'Engaged Realism', interview in Mandala (October/November 2006).

IMAGES: Bambi Meets Godzilla, anonymous web-image in homage to the film Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969) created by Marv Newland; Permaculture Flower by David Holmgren

How do you like them apples?

I have no respect for the police
they can see it in my face
I don’t have
to say
a
thing

But every Eve already has me
passing by through this extra-eden
with no visible weapon
no visible cuffs
yet I would willingly walk
to whichever gaol
hand myself over
and confess.

I do not disrespect the police
but I do not share their faith in their authority
I see the clothes and shiny things
which are supposed to communicate
status, powers invested, my obedience
and these appear to me as
starchy
uncomfortable
ill-fitting.

While Eve’s every gesture
each combination of cloth
contains a grand mystery
which can brook only worship
uncalled for
but unavoidably offered
and I’ll stop all my scrumpying
for her cider.

James Piers Taylor, 9th October 2006, London


IMAGE: Policeman marionette (c.1870-1890) by the Tiller family Marionette Company, held at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Auto De Fe

Step into the square with emphatic strength
to witness the trial of faith
the mass will be preached in empathic length
edifying humiliation
for a billion primetime viewers
behind a billion dark glass veils

Put on you cilice, hair-shirt or iron-maiden cap
join the throng here in the Plaza Mayor
or here in the Plaza Corredera, here since 1481
Seville-born and boisterous, theatrical
sensational, ecclesiastical and civil -
now watch them come to
shave the heads of the apostates
scared heretics, scourged disbelievers
shame them in processions of filth
for ever dreaming differently, or whispering
(I have heard them)
‘I enrage the genitals of Davros with bananas’

You and I Inquisitorial,
anti-seditionary authority throned
in the jaded tear of red Vatican silk
to hear proclamation and sentence merge -
we policemen of god take a Jesuit stance
two for each dead man walking
interceding for the soul
decorously gagging each mouth

contritio – I’m so sorry
confessio – yes, it was me
satisfactio – I deserve all I get

Prepare the quemadero, the burning place
where we all relate to red-faced otherness
in porkchop flames and longpig streaks of bacon char -
we will hear the conversions first and
disposed unto mercy, let the garrotte be primed -
but flame the faces of these whoremongers
luego resuelto, lets the crowd build
and while we’re about it, throw on the corpses
of those who died under persuasion
let them feed the fire for their former friends,
with effigies too, of the already fled

Condemned to burn, billed for the privilege
soul queered over coals of despair
trust immolated, wounds seared shut
the spectacle rising in new apparition
barbarous sin expunged in civility -
god its hot here and I thought I saw a viper
crawl horridly through this cauterised brain
and there again, by the ovulating pope
a branch of mutton that once was your sister
clustered in flesh-ropes of melting skin
spelling ‘desire’, Latinate tails in the curl
of blue fire and dream fire -
wild screams within the carelessly rotted stake
we are pinned to but freed from

Who by fire in the heart of the crowd
who in the gold and mitre of office
who with the brand and garrotte in his hand
hooded and bent to his killing task?
Who in judgement tightly wrapped
who in the leer of election night
who in the glow of ancient green light
who ripped open in horse play
who in power at the crown of sighs
who in blindness to the orange skies
who at the terminal boarding
who keying orange juice futures by laptop
forgot the earth and her wet clay
forgot to breathe and pushed her away
seizing the wrist of the shortest day
that must be punished for what it might say
and for love, destroyed the fruit of love
for peace, eviscerated babies with shrapnel
for purity, fed the furnace with flesh
for enlightenment, drank black bile
from the fountain of hopelessness
for health, killed the soul of the world
for beauty, cut off Her lips and nose,
made tasteless marionettes from her hair
to mock and smear Her murder in lies
reported as justice, as no surprise at
the end of history triumphal
memory gone extinct
clash of civilizations
lacking civility
clucking madly
across time
and space
and race
waiting
for an
angel
to blow
the horn
plenty
of
empty
at saxophone time
your way, my way, no way
life knows only one way, open
motherly, embracing and otherly
in blood and milk and mud and silk and
bone and teeth and hair and scale, feather and leaf
stem and trunk, shell and beak and cellular pulsing, in
mitochondria and fractal consciousness, in rock and magma
and salt sea water, in rain and snow and the desert heat, prickly pear
and lemongrass nests, the flash of a salmon in bear river rapids
the screech of seagull, old yearning of wolves
gales in the ocean, bees in the petal-field
life in diversity uniting, unfolding
creating spaces and endless spaces, supporting
compassionate action
nothing to grow and nowhere to go
the play of forms in ceaseless dancing
tripled and tripled and tripled again
yielding flow, beyond language and thinking
animate substance, inscaped forgiveness, foreverness,
spaciousness gifted in sentient arcs, free and unparalleled
allowable, liveable, streaming fire-tears alive in a simple new rain
between faith and fate, fair and free, hope smelted to crystalline gems
wish-fulfilling cataracts, bone-fuelled and more beautiful in being
than any papal/presidential/kingly sanctioned dream – world-born,
earth–fruited, squeezed by life from ashen debt
rising on trenchant butterfly wings, the deathless death’s head smiling.



kh 3.10.06

IMAGES: Burning of the Heretics (Auto-da-fé), (c. 1500) by Pedro Berruguete, Auto-da-fe on Plaza Mayor, (1683) by Francisco Rizi. Both paintings in Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Nightingale Floor

Walking on the nightingale floor
Again
The dance of a suitor
To a music of creaks
That may be the particular serenade
Which opens this fortress
To Spring.

Behind fortifications:
Palaces

Within palaces:
Gardens

Inside gardens:
Rendezvous
Collocation
And selves without boundary.

Within fortifications:
Archers and arrows

Inside arrows:
Poisons – bitter

Behind bitterness:
Displacement
Distance
The capacity of the void.

But risk all this
For the palatial gardens
And for rendezvous
Collocation
And selves without boundary.

Make a music
From these creaks
Eye me between the paper shutters
And call off your guards.


James Piers Taylor, 24th September 2006, Essex



IMAGE: Himeji-Jo (Himeji Castle Evening - the Enthronement Edition) (1926) by Yoshida Hiroshi.

NOTE: Nightingale floors, or uguisubari, were floors designed to make a chirping sound when walked upon. These floors were used in the hallways of some temples and palaces. The squeaking floors were used as a security device, assuring that none could sneak through the corridors undetected. (definition lifted from Wikipedia).

Three centuries ago when last we were lovers

Three centuries ago when we last were lovers
The passage of one us to the grave
Was leavened by an act of seership
That prophesied us in encounter again
At this hour in this place
To walk again together
To share each others sight
And in the moment of that prophesy
We hid within a promise of the eternal

And did not consider
The fact also provided
That in this iteration of our souls
Love would be thwarted
That some polar force in the aether
Would make our bodies ache
With an uneven charge
That would not brook union
But would spill electricity about
In a mess of crazy.


James Piers Taylor, September 26th 2006, London


IMAGE: The Cycle of Samsara, courtesy of Krishna.com