God – EDEN by FREI

Euphoria: Expiration

We may well be determined and we may be defined but we are not definitive and we won’t go on forever and we won’t ever die: immortality is granted, though the wish is monstrous, as long as we take it upon ourselves to be the centre of our own attention.

Conduits to the stream. The energy, the code, the connection. We may yet go extinct; we need not mourn ourselves: we leave behind perhaps no legacy but our intention to do well.

Complex situations, simple choices: do you put anger in the world and hatred and want and division and them versus us and incomprehension and rejection, hostility, enmity, loss; or do you engender hope. Do you foster recognition, respect. Enjoinment: empathy. Different, differentiated manifestations of one and the same.

Never even mind that we’re human: remember we are god. When every mistake we’ve ever made is multiplied with every catastrophe, our hearts may hurt from the unwisdom we yield to. And yet: we can make it so, we can make it other.

The thing that we’re made of may yet lift us. We can, whether we want to or not; but wanting to is harder than saying no. Everything is known, everyone can be understood.

Accept as the deepest part of you that which you loathe most. The person you despise: you are him, you are her. Embrace them. The child murderess. The suicide bomber. The bludgeoner to death. You celebrate, you cheer, you dance your pride when your football team wins. When your psychopath strikes: suffer him to be your disaster no less than you appropriate your goal scorer’s triumph. The medals on the athlete’s chest are badges of your honour no more and no less than the bloodstains on the knife stabber’s hand are witness to your failure. Own it.

Grow up into the painful truths, and free yourself. There is no freedom without truth. There is no truth without pain. There is no pain that does not carry a reward. When all is said and done: start over. There is no reward without loss. There is no loss without self. There is no self that stands alone.

Surrender to the motion of a greater purpose. Even if you don’t understand. Even if you do not believe. Even if you’re not convinced. Your heart knows long before your brain, because your brain is more powerful than you think: when knowledge is you and you are the world and the world is an instance in just one universe and the universe is a thought and the thought is expressed then you are god: you are god.

Accept the burden of being all powerful. Make good on your promise. Dare love.

< {Orlando}

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Pyromania [8]

The police had no trouble getting the boys to confess to their actions, in detail. What they had great trouble with was understanding them: their motives, their emotions, their reasons; their unnerving casual calm, even now, even now that the extent of the damage, the depth of destruction, the heinousness of their deed was put before them.

The boys, in turn, seemed to understand and simply accept that all of this was exactly the case. They expressed no regret, or if so then only when pressed on an angry detail: the twin girls; these beautiful, lovely, five year old girls: did they not feel sorry for them? Yes, they said, they did. And the dog? The cute little spaniel? And the dog too, yes.

The police were not alone in being incapable of understanding the boys. The moment they issued a statement confirming their arrest, hate rose from the ground, like the stench of poison and decay. It spread, and quickly it turned into anger: fury against an incomprehensible evil that the people, the good people of Bournemouth and Boscombe, felt had nested in their midst and that had, as far as they could tell, nothing whatever to do with them.

The Earnest Psychologist, who was not, by the way, one who ever spoke to the boys, invoked many possible causes: disillusionment, suppressed sexuality, self-loathing, confusion, disorientation, parental neglect, parental overbearing, nondescript feelings of persecution, projection, detachment, disenfrachisement, loneliness, boredom, ennui.

The words to the people who had lost their huts, let alone those who had lost an old friend; a sister, a brother, a mother, a father, a grandparent; least of all though to those who had lost their gorgeous twins, and also not to those who had lost their little dog, to them, these words meant nothing: they were just noise. And it made these people, these good people, angrier still, and more hateful. And the hate ate into them and turned their misery into madness: a kind of madness, an uncontrollable fear and loathing.

For their first court appearance, the boys were driven in two separate vans—why the two separate vans? some people demanded to know—the short distance from their cells to the court building, and angry, hateful crowds gathered and shouted vile words and curses at them and called for their heads, banging on speeding police vehicles, endangering their own lives, rather than keeping the peace.

The ugliness was pervasive: faces distorted in pain and wrath and dismay. Loud voices, high pitched declamations, over and over again: ‘They’ve ruined our lives!’ ‘They should be shot!’ ‘These two, they belong locked up and the keys thrown away…’

The Angry Prophet wasn’t having any of it: ‘Don’t you see,’ he berated them, ‘you made these boys and you will make more of them: unless and until you look into yourselves and begin to ask questions of yourselves and what kind of people you are that you ignore in your midst those you dislike, there will be ones at ever-recurring junctures that will do some unspeakable thing, just to be heard, just to be seen, just to know they exist. Wake up, you dull, you smug, you sleep-walking idiots and ask why you are so punished!’

The people did not like to hear this, they shut off his rants, if not from their ears—he was loud!—then from their minds: he has ever berated us thus, he is the madman here, this has nothing to do with us, these kids have gone wrong.

The Sacred Sage was silent for a long long time. He feared not for his life nor for his wisdom, he feared for the humanity in these humans. After the Messenger had been pushed to the ground in The Square and punched in the face and kicked in the guts and stabbed in the neck with a broken bottle and been left to bleed to death, the Sacred Sage knew: we’re undone. We’re undone: we need to redo ourselves.

She was just a journalist, but not of the kind that quickly make up a convenient narrative that is simple and clear and easy to understand and that puts the headline “MONSTERS” on the front page with pictures of the two young perpetrators, as others did, without hesitation; she was one who had spoken to George’s crestfallen, hollowed father, to Andy’s shellshocked mother, to one or two teachers and one or two friends, and who had written a piece that simply and plainly and in gentle, differentiated language, but clearly, had stated that these two boys, Andy and George, were not evil, or different, or monstrous or inhuman: they were simply two boys who had done a terrible, perhaps inexplicable thing, but that it was not unforgivable. That in fact perhaps the only way we who now grieve for the elderly couple, the twins and the dog, perhaps the only way we can now move on and make things better again is to forgive them. Soon. Not absolve them, not shrug our shoulders and say: shit happens. But forgive them. Step towards them, embrace them, comprehend them.

The people were not ready to hear this, to read it in their local paper. They let a day pass, then another, then their rage took over and they waited for her, in broad daylight: she stepped out of her office at the Bournemouth Echo on Richmond Hill and was making her way towards the Koh Thai Tapas on Poole Hill for a bite to eat with a friend, when they pounced on her in The Square and took her life for speaking a truth they were not ready to hear.

The Sacred Sage saw only sorrow. But he knew then that he needed to counsel, and be his counsel never heard. He knew that his lone voice would be drowned out and that the anger, the fury, the pain, and the hatred would stir these people and eat into them for a while, but if ever the anger was to surrender to wisdom, the fury abate toward knowledge, the pain ease into power, and the hatred reveal itself to be love, then he would, sooner or later, have to counsel, and this would be hard and seem futile but it was all he could do, and it was at the same time everything that he must.

And he spake thus to anyone who would listen, though nobody did:

‘You are these boys, and they are you. Every fibre, every molecule, every thought, every heartbeat, every quantum particle that they are is you. You have not made them, you are them. You are them as much as you are the lovely twins and the cute little dog and the beautiful elderly couple. Own this part of you. And then heal it. Heal it not by hating it or attempting to expunge it, heal it by accepting that you are capable of this. You are capable of building these huts and putting into them quaint souvenirs and enjoying them with your lover, your neighbour, your friend, your gorgeous five-year-old twins and your grandparents who have been together for sixty years and who have never done or said anything vile in their lives, and you are capable of blowing them up and burning them down. You and these boys are one. I and you, we are one. I am no wiser, no sager than you. I am you too. The Messenger, whom you destroyed: she is you. All is one. We are this. This is who and what we are. We are Boscombe Beach, we are Bournemouth Town, we are the country, the world, and the universe. We are God. And we are Andy and George. And Andy and George therefore, too, are God. Everything we do and everything we do not do and everything we say and everything we do not say and everything we think and everything we do not think is who we are. And since we are God, it is for us and for us alone and for us together to make ourselves Divine.’

And having spoken thus, the Sacred Sage, unheeded, stood, bare but for his simple attire, forlorn, and smiled. He smiled because he knew, being sacred, and sage, that no matter how angry, how furious, how pained, and how hateful these humans were now, they were also still God, and their godliness would one day—perhaps far into an unfathomable future not yet envisaged, unknown to us yet, and deep as the reach of the Thought of God itself—come true. For surely, but surely, it is so.

< Pyromania [7]

Revival [1] >

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Neptune

I sit on the edge of the solar system, with Neptune, invisible. I’m known to exist, but nobody sees me. I think I see them, from a distance, through a haze. I can’t be sure. Twinkles, here and there, allover really: wondrous…

I have, inadvertently, become a god. This is both puzzling and absurd: those powers they invest in me are merely mythical. I am not even drawn to water, not as other people are. Some see the sea and jump right in. I don’t. I am content to sit there, pondering. Until the time comes. Until I’m ready. Until I feel the need. Until curiosity gets the better of me. Or temptation. Or just the wanting to have been in the water before going home. Not so much the desire to be in the water, as the desire not to have not been in the water at all. For a moment. Or two. With the lover, the dolphins, the mermaids, the waves and the fishes. The other gods. This propensity to ponder. It may be an affliction; but why not. ‘Why not?’ seems to be the overriding question. Is that what it is: a question?

I walk from Neptune towards the sun through the snow – like shooting stars, falling. I love the snow falling on my face as I look up at the sky, at the space, at these planets, the aboveness and the aroundness of it all; the path ahead is white and clear, and there’s no one about. Of course not: I’m alone. Alone on the edge of the universe.

A pang of love, a moment of pain. Love for whom? Pain of what? A special one now, this time, really? A sense of myself, now, really? Or of the idea of myself. Of the Concept. The Unreality.

I like my reality right now, I can deal with it, I can live up to it, make sense of it, or so I tell myself, knowing this not to be true, not entirely.

I walk, steadily—not fast, not slow—along the path of the planets, thinking myself Neptune. I am not a planet. I am not a god. I am not a myth. I feel millions of miles away from the allness of it all, but I’m about to dissolve into it, and this thrills me.

Is that a lonely path I walk or is it just deserted? Because it’s late. Because it’s out of season. Because it normally is deserted, the path, around now. Is it too late? This turns into a portentous question all of a sudden. Am I too far along the path, do I circle too slowly? But we know, we know, we are not planets, we are not rivers, we are barely human.

We are human. So bare though, so vulnerable, so thoughtful, so cautious, so hesitant, so almost capable. So willing, yet, to survive. So surviving. Thriving, even, against the odds. So gentle. So soft. So curly, the hair. So even the teeth. So tender the lips. So lovely the legs. So quirkily satin the belly button. So elegant the fingers. So delicate the eyelashes. So warm, so warm though the chest.

So fleeting, so insubstantial as I walk under fir trees and the snow they are clothed in, so naked, so wrapped up in my delusion, my reading the signs that aren’t there, my wanting it all to be and to mean something. Wanting it all. To be and to mean. Something.

I take pictures of the snow so I can send them to him, though I don’t even know if he wants to look at the snow through my lens through my eyes through the synapses of my brain that miss him, but I know he has never seen snow for real and I want to show it to him. His mind is not here any more than his body. What of his soul? It sits right in me. He would love the snow, I know, if he saw it for real. If he were with me now. If we were insubstantial now in the snow together, seeping into the ground.

I know these things. I now know them all, and they all make sense, and they will come to pass, and it all just needs time to arrange itself now. I want to be sure.

I missed Uranus on my journey, I realise, as I pass Saturn, wondering why that took so long, and I don’t mind. There’s an irony in this, but it is not a metaphor, not even a pun. Not a sign. It’s a coincidence: sometimes you miss a planet, that’s all.

I’d decided to surrender, to go with the flow, just to be. I’m calm at the thought, now, at ease. I feel a greater certainty than ever before, but I’m not sure about what. Just about. And I know I don’t need to investigate this, I don’t need to probe.

I don’t need to understand, because I already know. I don’t want to be the one any more who longs. I don’t want to be the one any more who pines and freezes. The one made of ice. And rocks. Enveloped in abundant gases. Who errs on the side of reason, out of sight, out of mind, out of being. I want to thaw and to melt and to meld with the one and to bloom and to lose myself in the all and to be.

And so I walk on, sunward.

< Preamble Jupiter >

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8 JoJo

Today is unusual in that it passes slowly. This is unheard of, more or less. For the third time in a row I look at the clock or the watch or the phone and I think, ‘ah, it’s not gone eleven; oh, it’s only just coming up one; hn, it’s not even three.’ Normally it’s, ‘what? six o’clock in the afternoon already, I need to get in the shower otherwise I’ll be late for the theatre the cinema the drinks or the dinner or sometimes the gig.’

But today I’m running early and that’s unusual and I’m wholly unrushed and wholly unpressured and really quite happy; the sun is out, it’s as hot as summer though it’s only April, and the time is barely two thirty in the afternoon. All of which is new.

The reason today passes more slowly than usual is probably because I’ve been up and functional since about ten, and the reason I’ve been up and functional since about ten is that I woke up about eight, and the reason I woke up about eight is that I went to bed about one, which for me is early, and the reason I went to bed about one is that in bed also was JoJo and I wanted to be with him, and that’s unusual too. (I’m changing his name here as well, by the way. Not that not doing so would land him in trouble, or me, for that matter, I don’t think, but I don’t know whether he’d want to be named and I don’t want to ask him because that would seem like making a big deal of things, and I’m not of a disposition to make a big deal of things generally, really.)

Everything’s a little different since JoJo’s arrived, three days ago. By coincidence, he arrived on the day Maxl departed, and within hours everything changed. Gone is the stuff and the friendly but heavy presence of a man who doesn’t really want to be here but doesn’t not want to be here either, who seems to lack all sense of humour but still retains a modest charm, who has brilliance concealed by sluggish thinking and earthy inaction.

Gone is the farmer who somehow found himself in a city, who almost by fluke made it to London and into my life where for a while I thought he ought to stay, but from where to know him departed I thank my angels, god, the universe and all that is in and around it, because after I previously had asked all of them for him, they have shown themselves wise and forgiving, by putting him there for me just long enough to see what that would be like, and then, without fuss or damage, taking him away again, no questions asked. Thank you angels, thank you god; universe and all that is in and around you: thank you.

JoJo is more than a breath of fresh air, he’s a tonic, a breeze to keep you alive and awake; and he’s done what I couldn’t expect he would do but still knew he would, he’s come back, if only for a few days, and so while we’re not sleeping together as in ‘sleeping together’ now, we’re sleeping together as in sleeping together, and I like him next to me in my bed and sometimes it happens that I snuggle up to him, and when he gets up at an unfeasible hour in the morning to go to work, I briefly stir, sensing him unclasp himself from my probably too firm embrace, and because the sun is already shining and I had a good dinner with him the night before, which he cooked, and because he’s the only person I’ve ever known to come and go like a cat, unperturbed, unencumbered, loyal but free, dictated by his external needs maybe more than by his internal wants but nonetheless appreciative of the shelter, attention and strokes for his warm body and reciprocal appreciation of his comforting presence I can offer, he wandered back into my existence, and I have no idea how long he’s going to be here for, but while he’s here I am happy, and because I am happy I like to be near him, and so when he’s home I go to bed early so I can go to bed with him, and because I go to bed early I wake up calm and rested even though I don’t sleep anywhere near as soundly as I do on my own; and the day passes more slowly than it normally does, and I think maybe the day passes more slowly because without knowing it or being aware of it or consciously acknowledging it, I am waiting for him to come back, and part of me wonders if that has a meaning, and an even more reticent part of me wonders if, should it indeed have a meaning, that meaning is that I am slowly changing, at last, and if that is the case then what, exactly, in turn, does that mean?

< 7 The Space Boy {Detour} >

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7 The Space Boy

He is a quietly spoken wonder, a boy who has never grown up; a spacealien of the loveliest nature, a Zebedee who has bounced off his Magic Roundabout and somehow found himself in a world full of people: I adore him.

Where Laniakea’s fibrous filaments’ ends disentangle from her neighbour’s, to float, as jellyfish through water, amid dark matter in slow, rhythmic pulses, the Space Boy has sought out a moment of respite for comfort and warmth and sat down with me in a Camden pub with a pint each of ale, autumn time.

I love him, Space Boy, in a way I love few. He’s about to get married. He doesn’t mean to marry; every signal his subconscious mind emits says he doesn’t want to, and every action that his conscious mind commands says he must.

He doesn’t send out his invitations, he forgets arrangements, postpones, prevaricates. He talks, on the verge of getting drunk with me, about the revelation his sister-in-law-to-be gave him when she told him it was a continuum, not an either thing or an or, a this thing or that. Clearly he senses himself on that spectrum, somewhere towards the brighter colours, but, that light notwithstanding, he’s lost. Will no one hie to his rescue?

I can’t. I once nearly did. We’d stood facing each other, our hands on each other’s arms; and our lips almost touched. Then his brother walked in and the moment had gone: the night was spent in separate corners of the universe; I in mine, he in his. With that moment gone, all moments like it were gone, but my affection for him hasn’t waxed or waned like the moon, nor shall it: steady as a star it remains even now that he doesn’t want to and knows he doesn’t want to but knows he is about to tie himself in a knot.

Laniakea drawing away from Perseus-Pisces. I have a feeling this isn’t slow. The more I look at the Space Boy and listen to him expound on the vibrations, on the music of the spheres, on how tuned we are into each other, the more I know that what to us seems imperceptibly slow and unfathomably deep and incomprehensibly vast and impenetrably dark is bursting with energy, is replete with substance, is contained in a thought, and is teeming, teeming with life; and with life comes death and with death comes disintegration and with disintegration comes decomposition and with decomposition come component particles and with component particles come clusters of mass that attract each other and with clusters of mass that attract each other come new constellations and with new constellations come configurations and with configurations come potentialities and with potentialities come energy fields and with energy fields comes communication and with communication comes connection and with connection comes communion and communion is love and love is energy and the Space Boy and I are that energy and our minds are a dance and dancing is joy and joy is the present and the present is now and now is forever and forever is what we want it to be…

The Space Boy and I are lying on our backs on the ground looking up at the sky. The sky is plastered with empty silvery foil sleeves into which he will pour his spirited being. ‘I never want to not hold you dear,’ I whisper and rest my head on his chest looking down into the endlessness that ends where another begins. We are at a synapse in god’s brain and god is our own idea of our meaning: no wonder we sense god’s grace when we feel the pulse of a heart and bathe in the brainwaves of our fellows, our friends.

The Space Boy leaves me to think myself humble and rich. Has not he travelled lightyears to be here, to share one thought with me only? I treasure this thought and keep it inside my head where I know it won’t be contained: once thought, a thought is already encompassed in our common conscious, and he knows and I know and they know and you; we all know:

We all are one.

< 6 Domesticity 8 JoJo >

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Expiration

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EDEN was originally published in random order. Starting 1st August 2018 it is being reposted in sequence. To follow it, choose from the subscribe options in the lefthand panel (from a laptop) or in the drop-down menu (from a mobile device).

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Neptune

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Pyromania [8]

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8 JoJo

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