All Good

All good.

I am not yet midway through what I would hope to be my whole lifetime. Hélène Cixous’ mother, Eve, lived to be 103 . . . why shouldn’t I? My relation to needing to work with complex material is slowly changing, or rather intensifying as a function of wanting active and thorough release. I don’t ask myself the question of the magnetism, I just trust the timing of the association. As Michael Eigen says, I trust evil. I also don’t believe that death may come before death, it simply comes. But this can be a staging, a delay, an alibi for feeling safest inside pain. My Rinpoche is offering a children’s teaching in this moment and is saying that a children’s teaching is best, the best understanding of open intelligence we have is the simplest, this is the best we can get, the best itself. Why do I sacrifice too much for my writing, or do I? I like to think that I don’t, that I would make a singular pleasure to land in just one person’s singular lap and that would be enough, with and without me the reader’s find is everything, the beauty of a gift beyond conventional thoughtfulness and care, and it can land or not where it may. But a part of me knows writing is more often than not a hangover from a past age. Someday the poem will be as antique as the idea of heaven, says Wallace Stevens somewhere, and I always secretly feel the same way about my writing. I imagine myself, instead, in the sun, on an island, swimming in the sea . . . now and again, maybe, writing a tiny number of words on a few slips of paper that blow out of the open window at night and are lost.

All good, such are the simple words that make up a lesson we only have in calm moments, when the internet dies away and we come back to an internality and privacy as dazzling as the fading memory of the day’s light kept in the warm night air on the nuchal skin. I remember swimming in the sea off Calvi in Corsica, stretching out my body on my back in the water into a star-shape under the full moon, utterly trusting. Aqueous starfish yoga, primal stretching, like a body yawning. Why wait a whole life to get out? I thought I had already? Writing is a cramping and for people not yet fully ready to swim in the sea and be sad because they are less stimulated by giving up, it doesn’t always allow the bones to relax. To lay on the sand, in that way we all do, eyes only just half-open because the sun is nearly blinding, fingers play with the grains of sand, you feel immensely relaxed to not need any identity at all. All good.

All the effortful struggle to get somewhere and make beautiful things before we leave the planet for good, all this is all good too? The way we confuse the end of our own identity with the way all sense and identity end, the way this confusion itself becomes unique and less confused, the way there has never been any lack of clarity about anything at all, all good, all good. When your mind goes out towards the stars on those rare nights, those holiday nights, hasn’t it travelled all the way that it could? I am convinced that we are already as artificially intelligent as we can be. I am haunted, when I wake from afternoon sleep, by the sense that when we all go, we all might now go forever; that it seems so serious, I once said in a sentence it is impossible to say, not to be here. All good. All good. All good.

If it seems impossible to say these things, if they get stuck in the throat forever like a terminal fish bone, then all good and all for a reason. Who am I to say any of this? Who am I trying to impress when I write? Who do I want to love me? Who do I want to hold at a distance so that I can feel safe in not being loved or loving at all? If I wrote what I was really writing for, no doubt the writing would fall apart. It would break my heart to remember what I am really thinking it is, how petty and beautiful. Is this all good too? Yes, it is.

Stretching out into the water was stretching out into the unknown, my very body aura stretching to the point and points where the concept ‘extinction’ no longer had shape, no longer had an outline, the body at liquidation point remembering its simplest heaven water merger, contacts and bliss, its tattooing with angelic matter, with colour-musics, with reine Sprache, with the sovereignty of the mother, the spiritual meaning and feeling of being taken by the scruff of the neck and asked to relax. Why mistake words for love? Why say anything at all? The blind and the deaf are exceptions to our exceptions. We might build a perfect society thousands of years into the future based on the colour-charts of a universal music alone, as at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and yet how would the deaf be a part of what we all then shared? When socialism comes, will I choose the most beautiful person to marry because I am beautiful too, or will such abundant equality of mind ever be available that I can see in my own beauty enough of universal beauty to love the nonbeautiful as beautiful too, which they are, which they have been, which they will be?

I love the internet. I love the internet, but I came onto it late, and sometimes I think it is impossible and it has taken over my life. I love the sardonic fragments of language, the sense of endless cynicism that actually submerges us in new elements and works something through. I love the freedom of not having to face others so that instead they can see what is really inside me and not be distracted by the inequality of physicality and location and reputation. I love the coolness, the funniness, the fondness, the beautiful mess, the all night kiosk, I love knowing that I am on the best side, the side that has won, the side that did not pretend to know everything, the side that chose not to punish others, not to cancel the human being from afar, without knowing them, without qualms. Did I really do that though? Did anyone? Did I ever do anything that I said? Did the internet do anything at all?

All murmur finitude

he is anger itself

at what?

they were found trying to die together

indifference to life

whistling India Song and Close Encounters Theme Tune on the way to work in the morning

I love you like that, in that love

we shall fire on the retard lepers

you can’t avoid it

we shall kill every motherfucking last one of them

you cannot avoid this

you are someone they need to forget

you are someone that needs to be forgotten

all I know how to do is shout

her Triestienne name in deserted Calvi

what are the islands?

This lapse and fall into poetry is just that, the predictable rhythm of the oscillation between prose and poem is all well and good, and also predictable and staged, a way of turning off an irreversible confirmation. Negativity cathects and splits naturally within the end-stopped poetic line, there is no way around it. We extend the line or abbreviate it, it remains the same. Everything is pledged, promised and fulfilled in a natural perfection without effort, all good, all simple, like the sextillion stars in the night sky above Calvi. I am not an angelic entity, but I am no other identity either, none at all, except the magnificence and uni-heart of open intelligence. What is the obligation of all phenomena? It is the inherent restraint and control of natural perfection.