When you are dead

If one were to imitate Dante, that is, to perform the act which Lucan and Virgil did on Homer, then this is the question which you should pose yourself when you start:

What happens to you when you are dead?

You might just as well ask a question just as difficult, difficult in a different way:

What happens to you when you are alive?

What we suspect in general happens when you die can be summarised by a saying I heard from a boy today:

'You know the white light you see, at the end of a tunnel, when you are dying? That is a woman's vagina.'

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I have no interest in talking in a rational way about the strangeness of the world when we are alive. I have appreciated David Icke's work because it involves us in this strangeness: he seeks out things which seem to add up to him alone, and generally convince no-one else. It is convincing to him that we existed in another dimension prior to birth here. And we go back there, scarred and beaten.

Writers don't tell you much about what they believe in their private mind. But it is important not to become dead and empty on that account. In public we can say public and incontrovertible and pointless things. 'Welfare spending should be cut a bit / increased a bit', 'the European Union is / is not a financial benefit to our country'; these are examples of public ideas.

But private ideas exist, and should not be expressed: 'I talk to God in the evening, and he told me when to invade Iraq'; 'the spirit of Gladstone, being eternal now, is with me everywhere I go, and he gives me moral direction'.

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With respect to 'What happens to you when you are dead?', that question should be asked with the following understanding. If we are to go to hell, Dante describes it as a repetitive experience of knowing pain and failure. But heaven, by contrast, is not boring.

We have suspected that heaven would be tedious. But as Dante describes it, God is the source of all ideal entities and archetypes. That is, all possible things reside in Him. When the poet is in heaven, he finds people with higher and higher appreciation of God, this source of all things. And Beatrice cannot take her eyes off him. Why? Because looking at God is looking at life here and now, in all its variety, but absolute understanding and peace.

Those who do not want absolute understanding and peace today will not have it then; this God is simple: the source of intellect and ideas. He makes a distinction between good and evil. What is good is to know the truth. What is evil is to obscure it.

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Today, in the world of late twentieth century Britain, and this first decade of the new century, ideas are considered to be epiphenomena of the brain; intellect is often associated with the illness of some aspergers syndrome or other. Evil is one of those 'hate-speech' words.

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Dante wanted, Barbara Reynolds speculated in her biographical study, to become a monk in a Dominican monastery. That is, he wanted to take part in the highest activity of humans; silent prayerful meditation, alongside soldiering, is the highest occupation. Poetry is always written from the same perspective.

What I am not

After a fit of severe depression beginning in 1993 and ending in 1995, I went to London. I went looking for TS Eliot and WB Yeats, or their ghosts, or those who today take on their power. 

I had been depressed since I began reading. It was the typical depression: inability to think, to act, to make arrangements with other people, schools, or work schemes. Food was unpalatable, people frightened me, my own mind was a stranger to me. 

Without animus or feelings of revenge, I say that it was the secondary school education in Britain which brought on the despair. Reading a few pages of Nietzsche and realising how little I knew and how little prepared for existence I was as a subject, a few pages of Nietzsche set in action something like a process of waking up from a dream. When I awoke from the dream of British childhood in the late twentieth century I found myself badly educated, not wealthy, and in a vast desert of nothingness. And because I was not wealthy or educated, I could not make any change on this vast desert of our country and our world. 

What was the desert? Motorways, TVs, supermarkets, employees, and millions of people without any notion of history; an ugly world in which there is nothing glamorous. The music was awful from the shops and radio (if it were good in the past, my education was so poor that I had no idea where to find it). Where God does not exist except in a tiresome and mad way in the minds of the mad. 

I had been expelled from the sixth-form art classes for being too good at drawing, and not interested in imitating cave paintings or making papier mache casts, or making collages from bits of newspaper. 

I took it upon myself to be Jesus in a time where God is dead. From day to day I sustained myself as an adolescent with the idea that I was going to have a rebirth as Christ. I lived on the outskirts of civilisation, in a farming village in Wales. 

A friend of mine, who used to play bass in the band I sang for years before, went to live in London for a year. I went with him, and began my attempt to become part of the literary world of Yeats, Pound and Eliot. It was not successful for various reasons. 

One of the reasons I never had a break through to publication was this: the poetry was not very good and could still find nothing to write about, if I could even write anything at all through the despair. Since then I worked on two big poems and these were submitted to Faber and Faber and others. 

I suppose the last time I bothered to send them to these pretend poetry publishers was in 2006, when I approached quite a few of them with manuscript pages. The rejection letters came to me from home while I was in the first months of my tour of Iraq. 

The poetry I was working on at that time, and which was rejected by those magazines and publishers, is to be found in my book on Iraq. Something about the coincidence of being rejected while also being in such a bad position (and poetry is absolutely associated with the threat of death) has made me disinclined to offer my work to any professional publisher again. 

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The new poets listed prominently in the depressing book shops of a British street stand out: Pam Ayers and that Liverpool poet, employed by the BBC. These people to me are like garlic to a vampire. Let poetry book sellers and publishers have their Pam Ayers and their fay Liverpudlians. 

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Art is a mirror of existence; or a mirror of the self at least. And the mirror should be specially silvered so as to show the Christian or religious aspects of existence - things which are not apparent in it when we live it simply and unreflectively. 

It wants to be seen or heard, and what I am not is somebody whose art is seen or heard in any way. And yet, this is good in the following way: in a time when everything is for sale, then what is and has always been priceless (poetry) has no place. Let the world fall to ruins if it makes no place for what is eternal and what shows the truth. 

What I am

The works

It's on the basis of the above, containing one book of poetry, that I name this blog as I do. I speak as I find things, and I don't find them to my liking. Tough.

I have no time for today's poetry, or the world around it; I mean the 'culture' of poetry. It's too big for a start, without any elite in charge of it. For another thing, modern art is decrepit in all its arms and types. There are art classes all over the world in which art and poetry is 'therapy', and is particularly useful for those with learning difficulties.

Professional art, the kind you see people buying and putting on the walls, is unquestionably and often intentionally an attack on our sense of beauty and the requirement that the artist show a great deal of skill.

I suppose we try to make ourselves like each other, similar to each other, and  keep our mouths shut so as to be liked. But more or less everything about British and world culture is trash.

There are a thousand reasons for this, causes, including: the world wars (which broke our nerve), immoral use of money (or unregulated capitalism), the death of Christianity in the West; there are thousands of causes of the rot of our world and of this country in particular. I don't want to assign blame; I focus on what is true and good, and then compare it with what is false and worthless - which we find everywhere we look.

Let's be clear. The only person who matters in this existence of ours is me; and my friends and those I love. And coincidentally, I have not read a living poet who interests me; there aren't any, in fact, who deserve being read. We are disgustingly overcome by overpopulation, the influence of the ethically and religiously degenerate rich, and also by a lack of time. I regret like Dante the miscegenation of our culture with foreign influences and immigration; the decline of the Church, and the loss of an Empire.

Perhaps there are people who feel as I do. There is something to be learned here, I hope.