Archive for June, 2008

Caught in the golden spiderweb of a church,
he waits for the white light to devour him.
But the bastards made leaded windows:
there is no escape. One day someone

will lift the heavy anchor of the altar and light
will finally come at bay, reddish, cunt-like
chasing the fat black spiders
of confession away.

Someone, far off, remembers his name
and calls him away before he has the chance
to strangle an old lady with one of his golden hairs

who came, every morning, to weep
never noticing how he, hollow-eyed
never heard a word she’s saying

because the birds outside
sound deafening. Deafening.

I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.
– George Carlin (attributed: source unknown)

I’ve begun worshipping the Sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the Sun. It’s there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There’s no mystery, no one asks for money, I don’t have to dress up, and there’s no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to God are all answered at about the same 50-percent rate.
– George Carlin, Brain Droppings

After I broke up with A. I immediately got into a relationship with S., a punk girl I had met in De Joek. She was a small, tender and bleak little girl with an enormous amount of eye shade on and pretty wild hair. The weird thing about her was that, even though she looked pretty punky, her mother was seriously religious and she was still going to church every Sunday. That’s a pretty weird thing to do for a 16 year old punk rock girl but one time I actually went together to see what it was about. I didn’t like the sermon at all it felt like these people were some sort of weird plants and the priest was the guy who had to give them water once a week.

Much to my demise S. also believed in the ‘no sex before marriage’ thing. Well we did have sex, but just not the full monty as that was forbidden. At some point I remember getting really tired of her. She came visit me and was sitting on my bed. I began holding a fiery speech about why everything she believed in was a crock of shite. I did that with such force and conviction she was dazed and said she wanted to go home. She looked sort of disoriented and I let her out. 5 minutes later the doorbell rang and she was standing there, totally deranged and hallucinating. She was simply incapable of riding her bike and we had to call her parents to come pick her up. I don’t remember exactly what I told her but apparently it was more than she could handle. It’s fascinating, however, that one can actually cause hallucinations by the mechanism of speech. I think that was one of the first moments I realized what the power of words or poetry can be.

When I started being a punk at 15 I certainly wasn’t a conventional punk by any standard. I remember having this jeans jacket I decorated with hundreds of needles, medals (I had lots of chess medals I had won when I was 10-11 years old) and other weird regalia. I did the same thing to my shoes, and I put monopoly bills everywhere and bells. As you might imagine that looked seriously weird. I looked like a decorated pin cushion and the monopoly bills and bells gave it a strange surreal after touch. It didn’t take very long before everyone started to complain about the bells I tied to my shoes. When I walked through school it sounded like it was Sunday. It was a rather quick transformation from being an unnoticed little nerd to most weird creature that ever walked the school. Most people felt I was nuts but there also was some admiration of people that admired the courage of what I was doing.

The school principle didn’t care much about courage. That’s not what our schools are for, courage needs to be punished somehow as it doesn’t produce the model citizens schools like these are build to produce. The principle called my father to school and told him I should be sent to a shrink. My father was pretty embarrassed, being a rather model citizen himself, but luckily he’s as allergic to the idea of shrinks as I was.

I walked around like a living Christmas tree for a few months until I got tired of it and changed my strategy. It did get me into some trouble – there was this big Chinese kung fu guy who didn’t appreciate my sense of fashion very much and on top of that I had demolished the glasses of his brother when he and some of his stupid pals tried to harass me in school. He stalked me one night at a club and when I was bicycling home he came after me and would have beat me up if some people didn’t pass making him change his mind. He cycled on. His plan was, however, to wait for me in the dark forest between Geldrop and Mierlo. Luckily the idiot wore a white shirt so it was easy to spot him in the dark and avoid him. The guy looked like an overhormonized version of Bruce Lee so I suppose I was sort of lucky. The point in life is rather to pick the right sort of fights and avoid the ones that have no spirit. When I demolished the glasses of his brother that was a spirited act: they never harassed me again. It did evoke another guardian but death was stupid enough to wear a white shirt that night.That’s the lovely thing about death: its so ultimately predictable.

‘Adam and Eve in Saudi-Arabia’

The Christian story of Adam & Eve and the serpent is a plagiarized story as most stories from the Bible are plagiarized from other sources. The source of the story is the Jewish Kabbalah and in that context the story actually makes sense. It’s not a parable about some guy and girl far away in history but a parable about you & me, everyone! The Original Sin is something that happens in everyones life. On the Tree of Life there is a false sephira, Daath, which is also known as ‘self-knowledge’. It lies between Kether (Divinity) and Tiphareth (Consciousness). The apple in the Christian adaptation is Daath, and after eating from the apple Adam and Eve become ‘aware of their nudity’ in other words self-awareness starts.

As babies and little children we are not restricted by this false Sephira. We simply live without having any self-image. The Self-image is a byproduct of the education (snake) our parents and schools give us. It blocks the communication between supreme being and the consciousness, which before that were one.

After we eat of the Apple of Knowledge, however, all of us start to be aware of ourselves, and our consciousness starts to be divided from our being. We start to have an image of ourselves which blocks our true expression.

How do we go from there? There are two ways of dealing with this situation. The first is to find a self-image one is comfortable with. This is what most people do. It has some advantages since it causes the mind to operate reasonably undisturbed and it brings some peace to most people. People who find and maintain a self-image they are comfortable with are generally known as ‘happy people’.

It doesn’t mean a whole lot, because in fact this image they are comfortable with is completely fake.
There is another road, the road of learning to get rid of all self-imagery. This is a hard road however and requires one to pretty much battle for the rest of ones life (which isn’t a bad thing at all since the sense and meaning of life are essentially to put up a good battle). One develops techniques to stop identifying with ones self-image. The more these mechanisms behind self-imagery are mastered the more easy it becomes to switch and correct ones identities. At some point we can simply get rid of the self-image and be reborn as the child we once were, but a different child who has the triumph of knowledge in his pocket.

If you are a person who always has the same image of yourself you must ask yourself what it is you really want. If you are one of those people who is content to live with one self-image you are comfortable with, cudos to you. If you are a person who always has the same image of himself but it’s a discontent image then you might rather take up the great battle. You have to realize the image is fake. It has nothing to do with you, it’s like an old photograph the mind took which it mistakes fro reality. You need to reset and reprogram your brain. This is a difficult path but its so, so much better than the path of the happy people. Because the happy people, they are fakes. Don’t let them know though, because happy people are dangerous people when you disturb them.

This weblog was mentioned on Ron Silliman’s weblog yesterday, a contemporary American poet whom I have never read. Well I have read some samples, now, and it looks pretty promising. Silliman apparently has been working on one single poem or poetic work since 1974:

He has written and edited 26 books to date. Between 1979 & 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, entitled The Alphabet. He has now begun writing a new poem entitled Universe, the first section of which appears to be called Revelator.

Silliman sees his poetry as being part of a single poem or lifework, which he calls Ketjak. Ketjak is also the name of the first poem of The Age of Huts. If and when completed, the entire work will consist of The Age of Huts (1974-1980), Tjanting (1979-1981), The Alphabet (1979-2004), and Universe (2005-).[1]

Now, that’s someone with a serious attention span! I love that sort of epic conceptualism. If I hadn’t already summarized the Universe in 17 poems in Karavanserai I would seriously consider doing an A-Capella with Silliman, but luckily for him I consider The Universe to be sort of a closed chapter of my life, now. That might change some day, who knows.