Something of meaning

 
"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating."

Pearl S. Buck, novelist and Nobel laureate (1892-1973)



If you relate to this on every level, you're not "abnormal" or "inhuman". What Buck meant by this is that you're build differently. You're not a "cruelly delicate organism", you're hypersensitive. You pay attention, perhaps too much sometimes, but then again you can't help it. With age is honed the capacity to process more efficiently, to compartmentalise, and even though some will say it is a necessary dulling of the soul, others will say that they pour more of their sensitivity into their creative output, that they embed their feelings and emotions into that something of meaning. And that helps, a lot, because when you look at that creation, you will no longer need to hold these feelings and emotions inside of you, they're in every fibre of this creation.


Just be you, and all shall be well.

 

The first day of spring

There is a shocking violence 

in the birds singing this morning

– this quiescent sunday morning –

perhaps they think that

after so many rainy, dirty days 

they ought to have the right to sing

for they do it so boisterously

– almost belligerent in the face of peace –

with a raw, unfettered rage

as if they cried ‘spring is here, spring is here!’

with a jagged knife to our throat

curdling both blood and coffee

like so many threats of burning the world down

they chant the behoveliness of revelling in

nature and life in drunken ecstasy 

upon pain of painful death

– enjoy or die –

– dance or die –

– fuck or die –

– and that’s final –

they don’t seem to care 

if their lungs explode in the chorus

– those scruffy savages

frothing at the beak –

or if they starve to death

– they sing, unrelenting

with every fibre of their frail bodies –

their incessant, arrogant cacophony

fomented it seems since the last equinox

isn’t a celebration, it’s an invitation to murder

to a clamorous massacre

in every hue and smell spring brings

as we all must partake in the rite

they’re past febrility, or even tension:

they’re out for bloody mayhem, these birds are

spurred on by a ferocious hunger

and ravenous lust for their

bellowing decrees the solitude of the flesh over

– step into the light and break body and heart –

as if the only way to cope with so much beauty

was to wreck and laugh and bleed and dance

yet it seems such a small price to pay

in the grand decadence sung

in the sunlit-engorged fury

of the birds’ extravagant song

for we know deep down they’re right

our hair prickling on the nape of the neck

and a jubilant sizzling in the pit of the stomach

with so many things to look forward to

– death, love, sex, comedies, tragedies –

on the first day of spring.

The hunger of the forest

Speared by the trident of the sun

on the hill overlooking Athens

the beast’s heart grows faint

 

The smell of charred bodies and wood

ancient and still as the rocks

weighs on the senses

The blood spangles

each drop mirroring

earth, sky and sea, and

the victor, legs akimbo

The hunger for the forest

equalled by the one of,

ravenous in its devouring of time ,

gorges up on the lives

lying there, standing there

never sated, it seems

The beast’s vitreous eyes

a glow of melancholy and ire 

the spectacular light in between

flickers like a moth’s wings

set afire on a torch

That very same flame which set

the hill overlooking Athens

ablaze like a thousand suns.

Brutes and beasts

 
He was silent for a long time.

“I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie,” he began, suddenly. “Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it—completely. They—the women, I mean—are out of it—should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, ‘My Intended.’ You would have perceived directly then how completely she was out of it. And the lofty frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on growing sometimes, but this—ah—specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. Ivory? I should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country. ‘Mostly fossil,’ the manager had remarked, disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury the tusks sometimes—but evidently they couldn’t bury this parcel deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate. We filled the steamboat with it, and had to pile a lot on the deck. Thus he could see and enjoy as long as he could see, because the appreciation of this favour had remained with him to the last. You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh, yes, I heard him. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—’ everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible—it was not good for one either—trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land—I mean literally. You can’t understand. How could you?—with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums—how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude—utter solitude without a policeman—by the way of silence—utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong—too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil—I don’t know which. Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place—and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won’t pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!—breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don’t you see? Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in—your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business. And that’s difficult enough. Mind, I am not trying to excuse or even explain—I am trying to account to myself for—for—Mr. Kurtz—for the shade of Mr. Kurtz. This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honoured me with its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether. This was because it could speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and—as he was good enough to say himself—his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his—let us say—nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which—as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times—were offered up to him—do you understand?—to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899
 

thirty thousand people

The day was torn and grim

birds yet began to sing

as if they knew

nothing’s eternal

and old gives way to new

that man, one day, will fall

to the nascent murmur of

thirty thousand people chanting

in the fragile dusk of the night.

There is no chosen one,

only the days, torn and grim,

and sometimes hung in the sky

a great white pearl 

that makes us cry

to the undulant tumult of 

thirty thousand people chanting

in the gloaming dark of the night. 

And lost memories

keep coming back

torn and grim

and we dare not look

and we cannot understand

and we thought

we could deal the final blow

estocadar the pain 

the unease, the numbness

perhaps drowned in the roar of

thirty thousand people chanting

in the solemn dark of the night.

But the bull in our brain

in one last flick of his horns

impales, bolts and bucks

in the navel through the mouth 

rips us apart

leaves us bleeding

blue and white 

walled in by the applause

and the deafening thunder of

thirty thousand people chanting

in the grimmer dark of the night.

 

Habits

I am a man of habits

I got to this conclusion

because I flash-realised

that I am hoping

that someone, someday

will see the patterns

the routines

nurtured for years

and wait where

we both expect

myself to be

Lichen

The blind woman next to me

fidgeting in her seat

visibly uneasy

brushed my arm

as if in need of help

with her train ticket

but she tricked me

her hand hovered

over mine, her

fingertips the texture

of centuries-old lichen

their pulp supple once

yet gentle still, attentive,

finding the folds in the skin

with such exactness

such deliberation

she smiled and

pursed her lips

fluttered about the scars

for she was but looking

for stories in hiding

for life, she said without words,

happens at the cracks

she held my wrist

the coarseness of her skin

made me wonder

if one day myself

I’d ever see

the way she did.

home again

The buzzing in his ears subsided a little

– the pain, the pain, though –

lying on his back

he couldn’t feel his legs

– what had happened though –

he was running and

Jack on his right was running too

and then, and then

too much noise

too much light

“Jack? Jack?”

the noise was still there

pounding

Jack didn’t say a word

perhaps Jack was too far already

he lifted his head

scanned the ruins

and then he knew:

war had happened

– he recalls the officer

on the campus saying

“War can happen, son”

– he had nodded his consent –

– he was bang on, that officer –

and war hurt like, like,

like a volcano

the burning searing

through the flesh

and then

his da was there

kneeling next to him

shushing him

(he knew his da)

(had passed away)

(when he was ten)

(he smiled at him)

his hand

tapping his chest

(his dad looked young)

(as young as himself now)

(his da smiled too)

“it’s ok, son,

it’s ok,

you’ll be home again

soon.”

In Depths

 

"Creativity -- like human life itself -- begins in darkness. We need to acknowledge this. All too often, we think only in terms of light: "And then the lightbulb went on and I got it!" It is true that insights may come to us as flashes. It is true that some of these flashes may be blinding. It is, however, also true that such bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary."

in The Artist's Way (1992), by Julia Cameron, artist, author, teacher, filmmaker, composer, and journalist (1948-)

 

At the spectrum's ends

 

"A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found. We should struggle not against the devil himself but what allows the devil to live — Manichaean thinking itself."

in Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003), by Tzvetan Todorov (1939-2017), Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, structuralist literary critic, sociologist, essayist and geologist.

Incidentally, I met the man when he came to my town for a lecture and to introduce this book which was just out. Fascinating person(ality) and thinking process (you could almost see the cogs spinning in his brain).