Reverie II.

"My life's a shadowless horse

If I can't get across

To you"

~ Marc Bolan (T. Rex)

Not too long ago, I was told by a certain Lady that I need to get off of my Dark Horse, by which she meant: resist the temptation to rebellion for rebellion's sake. Nowadays, horseless, I am ignored by the larger mass of humanity, it seems. So I think ...

As I sit here, in my little room, with Eliot, Whitman, Poe, Machen, LeFanu, the Bhagavad-Gita, some Old and Middle English lyrics, etc., by my side, -- as I sit here, I think of certain writers, creatures of an atmosphere opposed to the development of ethical existence (perhaps) but certainly amenable to -- and nurturing of -- silent meditation upon one's loves, and expression (in the form of linguistic constructs) of one's ego eimi ho On (cf. Exodus 3:14, Septuagint).

As I sit here ... and recall: Machen lived in a tiny garret, subsisting (quite like myself) on green tea, tobacco, and scraps of food snatched opportunely whenever hunger became a nuisance. And he wrote (as I do) under compulsion of boredom. Only difference: he had no laptop, no cellphone, no instant communication with/to so-called people ... He was alone. As I should be. But I write to others, seek acceptance, hope for love. Yes, I said it. Loneliness sucks. There's my 21st century provenance smacking its lips. Oh well ...

What would I do, I ask myself, if I were living in some attic in, say, Providence RI (Lovecraft land) with no phone, no computer, no persons? I'd probably go insane. So much for 21st century English letters. Belles lettres. I wish. To write something as propositional as Eliot's Waste Land , as circumlocutory as Whitman's Song, as claustrophobic as Poe's Amontillado tale, as cloying as Machen's Pan, as rending as LeFanu's Carmilla, as deeply gulf-defying as the Bhagavad-Gita, as brown and green and new and old and crisp as a morning with Mom yelling and the woods calling as the Anglo-Saxon and "Alliterative Revival" masterpieces ...

As all that.

What would it take? Some time spent in a dusty room, masturbating into sheets, drinking cold tea, eating salmon out of a can, reading the same lines over and over and over and over ... waiting for a theophany on the wall?

Perhaps just what life serves up. A shitload of disappointment. A plate of angst and emotion and sad eyes thinking of relief, of horrid testimony to some ancient era living only in foggy memory with a bit of eloquent phrases tucked on the side, with a friend who knows, a lady who blows, a tramp with a tattoo, a promise of life-after-death, some type of monster living on unknown and unknowable STUFF, regret teeming like wasps, slug-like growths on my paper, destroying the old days, laying waste to all that was ...

Overly dramatic

A whimper not a bang

The white flesh palpates, the small foot disappears for a moment, and I reach for the solace of her body. She was a succubus of the highest order, Huysmans would've loved her. I didn't, and I paid.

Alone again.

Et je ne trouve pas ma maison

Malaise

A free verse poem by Edward Moore ©2013

“…flesh without intellect, repellent to the eye, nose and imagination.”

~ H. P. Lovecraft

Intellectually inferior people make me sick to my stomach.

Those with no love for animal life make me sick.

I am sickened by the raw discourse of stunted minds, the lame clamoring of lost souls for whom religion is a claim …

I am sickened by the style of life that reduces all affirmative emotions to the status of breeding signals.

Too sick to do anything about it, I am sickened by the timelessness of stupidity, the universal appeal of the idiot.

Dostoevsky knew the formula: the lover of life so disgruntled and heartsick that he comes to hate the raison d’etre that has animated him for so long.

Whitman had a sense of the end of things.

“There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”

Indeed, the end is already here, and always has been.

Life lingers in dark corners, bare rooms, minds plagued by self-doubt, recumbent illusions, dreams of perfection tainted by brown liquid …

Life persists in minds drawn to the past, where illustrious figures stomp across silent fields, dreams of childhood, when a wizard was possible …

Life persists in a little studio in Philadelphia, where an Arethusa flows her liquefied body across a hardwood floor strewn with cans, wires, and Sathanas-knows-what …

Life persists in a café on South Street, where memories of my wife scrape like the overgrown nails of some demonic baby …

Life persists in New York City, on a pissy bench where my last drop of brandy has found a home in my khakis.

Life persists in a park in New Jersey, a dead phone and someone handing me a beer.

Life persists in a bedroom by the shore, some repentant drudge asking me how I like my eggs …

Life is a clan of basking lizards who have forgotten that Brazil is not such a bad place to be, right now …

A savior is something of which I’ve written: a hand to draw forth the pus of a wound too deep for tears.

A savior like Seth, who is alien – HETEROS -and uniquely qualified to draw our minds to the place where they really need to be, beyond the sun ...

The noetic sun beyond the sun beyond the sun ...

Neoplatonic life purges this realm of its raw idealism.

Existential malaise gives me to stay, to drink, to love, to stand alone, to promise others, to pray to a god in whom I do not believe, to read Ayn Rand, to vomit over Bukowski, to steal a glimpse at the sweet showers of April, to answer the phone, to regurgitate post-modern formulae, to pretend to care about some bitch and her kid, to give a dollar to a bum, to eat pizza at noon, to stay sober in spite of myself, to ask for a loan, to pay it back, to stand up to a big dude (who could easily kick my ass) just to impress a chick (and to actually escape), to satisfy her, to satisfy myself, to remember just how the Vorspiel to Das Rheingold moves my heart, to illuminate some dark passageway for a friend (speaking of Dante), to silently await my own savior in the form of … in the form of … in the form of …

Hue, April Formosa, veni! Vocat aestus in umbram …

Giant palms shading our eyes, our hands tickling playfully …

Such a paradise is a dream, only.

Flesh should be the receptacle of Beauty, not of Intellect …

Mind is too vast to require a partner.

Fragment

"... when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts."

~ T. S. Eliot

The act of thinking, which produces thought(s) [there is no such thing as Thought, as an abstract entity] is concerned wholly with the formation of concepts -- and concepts are linguistic structures. In response to the seething morass of sense-impressions, emotions, and general existential turmoil encountered by us on a daily basis, we use language as a means to organize and control this chaos, to stave off madness, and ultimately to create a meaning that is both personal and communicable -- through tropes and various figures -- to the more-or-less attentive world of others.

Focused thus on making sense of the unweeded garden that is the life-world, we find (upon reflection) that we are interpreting our reactions, giving form to something (our emotion-based thoughts) that arose out of chaos. We are therefore creators, not knowers. To know means to see clearly. Surely, by knowing we become ourselves objects. to be analyzed and carefully fitted into some conceptual schema that we formulate, and yet which is somehow other than our creative self. To know myself means to objectify myself, to become other than the one doing the thinking ... This begs the question, of course: Is this even possible? My act of thinking is bound to my experience, the here-and-now.

"Life piled on life

Were all to little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things"

~ Tennyson, "Ulysses"

I cannot objectify myself. I cannot rest from ego trips. The name that I am become is a trope for all that is essential to life. A "power greater than myself"? No such thing. For others are capable of producing context, restraint, laws, the envy of accomplishment that drives the flower, etc. ... But only I am capable of providing the atmosphere that renders all this hule aesthetically pleasing. To whom? To myself. The only judge that matters.

Comfort in the form of a legislator independent of my thinking self is an illusion of salvation. Healthy people seek to be saved from themselves. Such are human beings, normal and part of a world that has evolved along more or less life-affirming lines. Exceptional people seek not to be saved, but rather to transform their personal atmosphere into an ideal realm into which to retire, at will, for the sake of prosperity in the only life worth living.