Sandstorms

The other night as I watched a clip from Monty Python's "Life of Brian" a strange thought occurred to me. I was watching the scene in which Brian is fleeing a fervent horde of prospective acolytes. He is being chased because the crowd believes him to be their long awaited Messiah. As Brian flees he comes along a naked old man with a long flowing beard sitting in a desert culvert. The man waves him away and after some confusion, once Brian has caused him to break it, explains that he has been adhering to a vow of silence for 18 years. It struck me as insightful that a man would hole himself up in a desert not saying a single word for 18 years and suddenly all of his rigour would be upset by a man whom others believe to be their god. And not only that, but the protests of that man then lead to further misunderstandings about the divinity of Brian. It occurred to me that anyone who has anything worth saying can never articulate those things. It seems to me that understanding must necessarily remain uncommunicated, perhaps this is a quality inherent in real understanding. What then do we make of these blabber-mouthed mystics, these figures who unlike Brian, stand up before the multitude and profess to understand the answers to the question that no one in the crowd has even discovered needs to be articulated yet? They are devils of course, manipulators who are themselves manipulated!

What then does this mean for someone who feels the compulsion and dares to have the pretention to write down his thoughts and communicate his own experience to the world? Am I yet another prophet who seeks to channel the eternal into some limited grain of sand so that I can hold it before others and cry with great exhuberance, "LOOK I'VE FOUND IT, I'VE FOUND GOD, AND GOD IS YELLOW!" No! I will not do this, and this I think speaks much to the controversies which are sometimes conjured up around my writing. I often find myself accused of arrogance, of course I'm arrogant it stops me from evaporating, but I'm not arrogant in the sense that the word is being used, I am not attempting to assert control over people with my articulated perceptions. I am attempting to give something to the world, something of myself, but of course it is a selfish exercise too, I am desperately trying to weave together a fabric which I can wind about myself to stop my dissolving self from disappearing into the relentless march of time, into these torrential desert winds.

But, I am not trying to create some sort of post-modern relativistic art, some shlock of brickolage, a haphazard tip of the hat to chaos. I seek to go beyond that chaos, to breech the gap between oblivion and infinity and spread my arms wide in the dark abyss of shimmering eternity. I seek to say something firm amid this mire of watered down art I see around me. (As an aside, the reason I admire Helianthus' poetry is her audacity to put her swiven to rhyme in a generation of artists so desperately attached to irresponsible method and form.) This is not an absolute, or a weak absolute-for-only-myself, it is an absolute beyond perception, a deep understanding which really just brings me to silence. Am I then also a blabber-mouthed mystic, a fool who dresses up like a decent human being and dances his own sick pantomime infront of this crowd of people I think are before me? Can I reconcile mysticism with art? It would seem impossible as of now, since nothing I have hitherto written could possibly be defined as art. If a saintly hermit is seen by another, or even more, written about, are his experiences made void? I have a tentative answer: understanding must necessarily be complete, but the representation thereof must be acknowledged to be inherently partial. I am neither an absolutist nor a relativist, I see those extremes as rather the same thing, for when we perceive the world around us, we see that through to the nothing that everything is, to the oblivion existence is, and the unity that is apparent in that, this can only been seen of course, if you look deeply enough, past the layers of sand swirling in this raging storm. It is perhaps my task to represent with words all this that I see around me in partial form, but I must also be wary not to lead people to those amongst us whom I have seen residing in silence in their own desert culverts.