Sunday, 1 July 2012

A quick blast

So last time I wrote all was falling and now all is up in the air. Can't write anything. Can't do owt but wonder. Is it Canada or is it Leeds? Is it being normal or being mad? Presently, I'm being mad - but I keep thinking not to be. Too much in my head and too much pressure. A new beginning, the I Ching says. The problem, it says, was lack of flow, things getting blocked up. Sounds reasonable: maybe the flow - and life - will begin again. Maybe that's why no words come. The feeling that no one can understand me and no one could give advice. But maybe that's just projection cos I don't understand myself, feel so separate from the rest of the world. And that's just words. And, anyway, I keep everything back. No emotions, no feelings. Just calm wide eyes that watch all: a floating movie camera staring at the human race: an alien anthropologist wearing the most perfect disguise. All men aliens, for all men from another world travelling through time and space in bodies made from stars. Something like that.

And this body...

This body sits in a room. Contemplates endlessly where to put itself, what to do. Limbo and waiting and wondering and...no, not seeking - nothing left to seek. Observing with quiet interest and curiosity. Life is not something I do, it is something I see as it flows through me. Oh look, a river in my being - the river rushes on. I watch and wait and look down puzzled and half-smiling. The gorge it rushes through is green and gold and glorious. But to jump in would be fatal. Crashed and smashed upon the rocks. The water foaming rapid.

In other times it wouldn't be mad to have no fixed abode. Even great men slept as dogs. But in my head there is the world and all its voices and woes and fears. I have, unfortunately, let them get the better of me, and so I fear and woe too. Ah, to be old Lao Tzu and smile content lying in rags under the stars!

Sleep, sleep: I'll try to sleep. The older I get, the less easy it is, to be out there, running wild, living odd, shutting eyes on flickering phantoms of security guards and bastards. But when I was young, razor rocks I could lay on, and drift off good, and wake refreshed. That time under a truck in Anaheim, CA. And all those highways and cities and woods. Even the Norfolk cemetery, with its gladly sheltering Yew umbrella. No rain there did touch my head! And my sleeping bag and guitar case mattress was hotel heaven. But now I fear bludgeons and troubles.

Does all of that make sense? Does any of it make sense? I don't know what's happened to my ability to write - maybe because I delved so deep into labelling it all "pointless" - and like when I was a boy who pretended he couldn't sing in tune, and then became no longer able - perhaps the wind changed? perhaps my nose grew? - maybe it's become a reality for me. Self-convinced. Hypnotised. Psychosomatic writerly paralysis. These words are not the words I used to know. The bee has gone bee-army; perhaps he has a bee in his head too. And on and on and on. Maybe I'm just a bee in someone else's head. This whole universe is. And somewhere a giant tiny man is scratching his ear and wondering why the universe keeps turning and happening, keeps telling him to write and say and do things. But it's all just an infinite procession of bees, right back to the original one, which must be so tiny that...but no, even the thing that is the smallest thing ever - the next size up from nothing - can be cut in half, right? Even the smallest number imaginable can be divided by ten.

Sheesh: what a tiny little bee that must be! And yet that's where all the power lies.

Ha! Fuck that bee that thinks it's controlling me - he's no less a puppet than I am, the son of a bitch, the swine (I love him really).

Ice is nice and rice is twice

as

nice/rice/ice.

Know what I mean?

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