For a while, perhaps a couple of hundred years now, everyone is encouraging everyone else to 'be yourself'; to vote as you like in elections; to seek to gain or spend money as you see fit; to chose your own love life and style of love; to do everything as if you were the centre of things.
This kind of thought is, in the light of the truth, a philosophy and a behaviour of evil. I say this bearing in mind what you learn from meditation. Meditation is, as Bataille said, its own authority. And its principle basis is the fading away of individual (usually fake and herd-like) individuality.
Hence, our culture is a culture of evil. People don't like to use that word, of course; it is a proscribed word. I suppose we don't use the word 'evil' because it reminds some part of all of us that it properly describes our entire culture.
Everything about the culture of individuality is calculated to bring about unhappiness, conflict, ignorance, herd behaviour, and the traditional vices demonstrated by Dante and explained by Aristotle, pitied by Buddhism, and laughed at by Nietzsche.
The same principle does apply in the arts, and their contribution to culture. Individualistic art, spontaneous and 'new', 'exciting' art is effectually an act of evil. The 'fresh' and exciting work of the winner of the recent John Moore's Painting Prize in the UK is a case in point. In order to be original and new, the painter has, like previous winners, painted something childish and stupid. Its merit, the merit of this terrible work, is that it is new, individual, and unlike anything you've seen before. But in reality, you have seen this kind of thing before: when people with no talent for drawing or the use of paint attempt to draw people. Presented as a serious work, and awarded the winner's prize in a competition - such events dimly show the evil of our culture.
Wednesday, 24 September 2014
Sunday, 14 September 2014
What I do
Despite everything, I just get on with it. One can say, with good reason: 'There is no tradition of art and no higher echelon of the world which is willing to admire true works.' Therefore, there is no painting, or poetry, or music, or architectural design worth taking an interest in.
But so what? Simply do what is right regardless.
There is no audience of people such as I am, or if there is, they are spread out and silent. This has been a greater problem for me. And my answer in my own way, may not be of use to other artists. They probably won't make any sense of it. But my resolution and the only way I have got myself out of a lethargy due to there being no 'market' for my work.
My response has been, lately, to write, draw and work generally, for a child; for a person like the sort of standard outline of a person one often puts on architectural drawings to show the scale of the drawing against a person. The person I have drawn for is an outline of a child.
This suits me, since it means I throw aside pretension and the urge to be difficult and original. You don't need to be original when educating young people. You simply do and draw what is needed in order to teach. Further, one gets down to basics. Children don't want to know the small details of some recondite problem or bit of learning. They want to know about God, life, action, and what is most vital.
So there is no audience; but on the other hand, in youth there is the desire for truth and fantasy which exceeds the reach of adults and our world's culture as it stands.
But so what? Simply do what is right regardless.
There is no audience of people such as I am, or if there is, they are spread out and silent. This has been a greater problem for me. And my answer in my own way, may not be of use to other artists. They probably won't make any sense of it. But my resolution and the only way I have got myself out of a lethargy due to there being no 'market' for my work.
My response has been, lately, to write, draw and work generally, for a child; for a person like the sort of standard outline of a person one often puts on architectural drawings to show the scale of the drawing against a person. The person I have drawn for is an outline of a child.
This suits me, since it means I throw aside pretension and the urge to be difficult and original. You don't need to be original when educating young people. You simply do and draw what is needed in order to teach. Further, one gets down to basics. Children don't want to know the small details of some recondite problem or bit of learning. They want to know about God, life, action, and what is most vital.
So there is no audience; but on the other hand, in youth there is the desire for truth and fantasy which exceeds the reach of adults and our world's culture as it stands.
Thursday, 14 August 2014
The Artist
There is no art at all without a culture. A collection people educated alike, with similar desires and expectations.
You don't, for instance, automatically admire Mozart and Bach. You are educated into liking them; you like them because others see something in them. It's the same with all art.
But the only education which has any point is one centred on God and religion. Nothing else is certain: and we don't educated people on the basis of nothing. I have no time to prove this.
However, art such as poetry gains its value by speaking to people. It is a special type of language because it derives from the religious inclinations of the people in an inventive way.
And when there is no religion in a culture, we have poets whose task it is to create a religious atmosphere without drawing on anything religious at all. That is, like Jim Morrison or Bob Dylan, and other grand and famous poets of the twentieth century, poets must create an aura around their own self - since there is no religion on which they can draw.
Obviously, in our time, words alone do not suffice, so they also bring a repetitious and low kind of music at the same moment as they deliver their awe-inspiring words.
And when we no longer are persuaded by this religion of Dylan or of Morrison, we lose nothing; we simply gain our maturity. And we have no option but to grow nostalgic about the past.
In the past there was a culture and a religion. Today there are just little bands of poets writing for each other, a club of mutual admiration; lacking even two words of poetry to rub together between the lot of them.
The same applies in the other arts, which also lack any ground today. One does not work for recognition in this age of ours. In some respects, the worse one is (and Morrison and Dylan were pretty poor) the better. It has always been a race to the worst and the bottom in the twentieth century.
(The crap drawings of Francis Bacon's art; the intentional noise of Schoenberg's music; the aggressive ugliness of the architect Foster).
You don't, for instance, automatically admire Mozart and Bach. You are educated into liking them; you like them because others see something in them. It's the same with all art.
But the only education which has any point is one centred on God and religion. Nothing else is certain: and we don't educated people on the basis of nothing. I have no time to prove this.
However, art such as poetry gains its value by speaking to people. It is a special type of language because it derives from the religious inclinations of the people in an inventive way.
And when there is no religion in a culture, we have poets whose task it is to create a religious atmosphere without drawing on anything religious at all. That is, like Jim Morrison or Bob Dylan, and other grand and famous poets of the twentieth century, poets must create an aura around their own self - since there is no religion on which they can draw.
Obviously, in our time, words alone do not suffice, so they also bring a repetitious and low kind of music at the same moment as they deliver their awe-inspiring words.
And when we no longer are persuaded by this religion of Dylan or of Morrison, we lose nothing; we simply gain our maturity. And we have no option but to grow nostalgic about the past.
In the past there was a culture and a religion. Today there are just little bands of poets writing for each other, a club of mutual admiration; lacking even two words of poetry to rub together between the lot of them.
The same applies in the other arts, which also lack any ground today. One does not work for recognition in this age of ours. In some respects, the worse one is (and Morrison and Dylan were pretty poor) the better. It has always been a race to the worst and the bottom in the twentieth century.
(The crap drawings of Francis Bacon's art; the intentional noise of Schoenberg's music; the aggressive ugliness of the architect Foster).
Tuesday, 8 July 2014
Why there was no twentieth century in artistic things
I don't like disorder; I don't appreciate closeness and intimacy. I don't want a poet's private thoughts, or feelings of affection.
Speaking on the grand scale, ours is a time when the chaos of change over the past couple of centuries has come to an end. Things are steady. History is over and we are settling.
In a settled condition of history, an order must emerge. A hierarchy, and a peaceful 'knowing your place'. The media make their living by assuring us that things are changing, but nobody falls for that.
The friendly investigative poetry of Heaney and Ted Hughes is for us now not worth reading. Some poet speaks of his local place, and another of his own local place. They don't assert that their local place is the best, but they assert that they have a relationship with it. I can't see any interest in their local affections any more. When we grow up we realise that these displays of affection are unworthy of our time and our place in history.
The twentieth century, with its Hughes, Heaney, all those who made so much of death, liberation, destruction; their playing with sacrifice and brutality of life - represent the entire cultural life of the twentieth century: provincial, broken, affectionate, doing all they could to be new, individual, breaking with their own recent history.
I don't like liberation movements because they are now empty. Who cares about the poetry of the troubles, or the poetry of Northumbria, or the poetry of Wales? Poetry lovers, no doubt. But it is necessary today to poetically return to recent history, and to the main trajectory of culture Before the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries and their chaos.
Affectionate, friendly, local, slightly sardonic but 'mystical' poetry - the stuff of Philip Larkin - it did not represent the chaos and doom of the twentieth century then, nor does it now.
-
The trajectory of western history is explorative and imperial. Its poetry should be so, too. Perhaps the only proper manufacturing left in the Western world today is in military production. The fact is, an empire does exist - but it is somehow against the spirit of the times to admit it.
When I do business work, I aim to make products and money. When I do military work I aim to win the engagement. When I do politcal thinking, I think along lines of dominating foreign enemies. When I do cultural work, I aim to create elite works of art. Any other objective is a kind of mindless rebellion against actual conditions and the trajectory of our history.
So, the self effacing rubbish of the modern art gallery; the stupid affectionate poetry of the twentieth century; the liberation and Leftist 'philosophies' of then and of our time - these are ineffectual and derisory attempts to break with actual history and our time. Poetry has somehow taken it on itself to rebel against actuality in people like Dylan Thomas - who celebrate their little local place as if it had any significance other than being something private and special for him.
What do I enjoy in poetry? Homer, Virgil, Sophocles, and all the ancients. Yeats, Eliot. The universal and the imperial.
There has only been one effective revolt against history and our inheritance: that was Derrida's philosophy. He naturally despised the Left for its infantile rebellion - which, like the Hippy culture of the 60s, had no power or sincerity or intellectuality in it. Derrida attended closely to our history, and his method of revolt was to posit the fact that there is a divine power beyond reality, or within it, which is nameless. He said that he dreamed and desired an other kind of reality, a future. This is the only way out of where we are. And it is hardly any route at all.
So when the artists and musicians of the twentieth century composed there rubbish - which one may see at any modern art gallery - and in the case of music - which one will never hear - when they composed their rubbish, they carried out a pointless revolt and a pointless affirmation of their peculiar and personal location in the world. But it simply means nothing anymore.
I understand that these are uncensored ideas which could do with some mistiness around them, something to hide the blatant aggression of them. But it's hardly as if anyone is reading this, is it? Besides, One must be be straightforward in a time and when talking to a people who refuse to face reality.
Speaking on the grand scale, ours is a time when the chaos of change over the past couple of centuries has come to an end. Things are steady. History is over and we are settling.
In a settled condition of history, an order must emerge. A hierarchy, and a peaceful 'knowing your place'. The media make their living by assuring us that things are changing, but nobody falls for that.
The friendly investigative poetry of Heaney and Ted Hughes is for us now not worth reading. Some poet speaks of his local place, and another of his own local place. They don't assert that their local place is the best, but they assert that they have a relationship with it. I can't see any interest in their local affections any more. When we grow up we realise that these displays of affection are unworthy of our time and our place in history.
The twentieth century, with its Hughes, Heaney, all those who made so much of death, liberation, destruction; their playing with sacrifice and brutality of life - represent the entire cultural life of the twentieth century: provincial, broken, affectionate, doing all they could to be new, individual, breaking with their own recent history.
I don't like liberation movements because they are now empty. Who cares about the poetry of the troubles, or the poetry of Northumbria, or the poetry of Wales? Poetry lovers, no doubt. But it is necessary today to poetically return to recent history, and to the main trajectory of culture Before the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries and their chaos.
Affectionate, friendly, local, slightly sardonic but 'mystical' poetry - the stuff of Philip Larkin - it did not represent the chaos and doom of the twentieth century then, nor does it now.
-
The trajectory of western history is explorative and imperial. Its poetry should be so, too. Perhaps the only proper manufacturing left in the Western world today is in military production. The fact is, an empire does exist - but it is somehow against the spirit of the times to admit it.
When I do business work, I aim to make products and money. When I do military work I aim to win the engagement. When I do politcal thinking, I think along lines of dominating foreign enemies. When I do cultural work, I aim to create elite works of art. Any other objective is a kind of mindless rebellion against actual conditions and the trajectory of our history.
So, the self effacing rubbish of the modern art gallery; the stupid affectionate poetry of the twentieth century; the liberation and Leftist 'philosophies' of then and of our time - these are ineffectual and derisory attempts to break with actual history and our time. Poetry has somehow taken it on itself to rebel against actuality in people like Dylan Thomas - who celebrate their little local place as if it had any significance other than being something private and special for him.
What do I enjoy in poetry? Homer, Virgil, Sophocles, and all the ancients. Yeats, Eliot. The universal and the imperial.
There has only been one effective revolt against history and our inheritance: that was Derrida's philosophy. He naturally despised the Left for its infantile rebellion - which, like the Hippy culture of the 60s, had no power or sincerity or intellectuality in it. Derrida attended closely to our history, and his method of revolt was to posit the fact that there is a divine power beyond reality, or within it, which is nameless. He said that he dreamed and desired an other kind of reality, a future. This is the only way out of where we are. And it is hardly any route at all.
So when the artists and musicians of the twentieth century composed there rubbish - which one may see at any modern art gallery - and in the case of music - which one will never hear - when they composed their rubbish, they carried out a pointless revolt and a pointless affirmation of their peculiar and personal location in the world. But it simply means nothing anymore.
I understand that these are uncensored ideas which could do with some mistiness around them, something to hide the blatant aggression of them. But it's hardly as if anyone is reading this, is it? Besides, One must be be straightforward in a time and when talking to a people who refuse to face reality.
Saturday, 28 June 2014
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.'
--
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'.
--
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.
--
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.
-
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 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.'
--
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'.
--
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.
--
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.
-
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.
Sunday, 22 June 2014
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.
--
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.
--
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.
Saturday, 21 June 2014
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.
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.
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