A Universe Inside of You

This week I was meant to take a package holiday and drink and read the thinking-work that so keenly knaws at my time. Instead I met a mind, and such a mind! We met, and we happened.

I do not really know what I am seeking. An authentic life? The resolution of purpose? Encounters? Human connection? Whatever it might be, I write this now knowing quite clearly it will be for the eyes of her as well as my invisible audience of those who have stumbled across me.

So when I was younger I wrote a poem. It culminated my time in Hull where I had an artistic life, albeit one without direction. It was one of the few I committed to heart:

Utter 

All awareness is accepted in these halls of thought
Grand tradition stands sure and fortifies the door
While youthful lusts endeavour a roomy infinite within. 

But outside these walls
Lies Utter
And all windows hope for the glimpse of Hell. 

In two stanzas it summons the nihilistic and existential hedonism of my youth (i.e. my decadent empty fun!). It opens with the idea that all awareness was accepted in my mind (the metaphor of the both one of a welcoming space that leads into other doors. Such doors of perception are both induced beyond conventional language, and towards more sensual, earthy concerns. Of course, to keep the mind intact, the 'Grand Tradition' of language, the pronoun of 'I', the notion of 'Sanity' and the like are required. They are immovable and a point of unchanging contact between the mind and the outside world. However, that they have to 'forif[y]' the door is somewhat disturbing: it speaks of a world that threatens with the very 'awareness' that is supposedly 'accepted' in the first line.

More strikingly than that, though, is the ultimate line of the first stanza that reduces lived passion to finite contemplation. Passion is 'lust', while all experience in the hall can only be 'finite', a terrible notion when juxtaposed with the damningly tiny adjective 'roomy'. Within this mind, experience is terribly small and ultimately insignificant.

It is within this desperate search for something bigger than a mind, while accepting the sovereignty sanity of the self, that the underlying metaphor into what Nietzsche called 'The Abyss' (that can stare into you, and corrupt you equally as it is corrupted itself) is spoken:

'Lies Utter'.

When I showed this poem to the academic and Irish poet (self-proclaimed 'asshole') David Wheatley, he declared that utter was an adjective, not a noun, and said no more. Of course, here is operates as both. Utter what? Monotheistic reductionism - that there is 'oneness' outside the mind. The idea that there is something entirely epic, perhaps not even sentient to human understanding, outside our minds. In order to understand this ether outside ourselves, we need to construct metaphors of religion and society and literature, rhetorical constructs that are perhaps 'lies' we tell ourselves. At the same time, this 'Utter' is laying around the mind with a casual swimming pool of existence. It is existence without meaning. Indeed, it could even be a quiet echo 'utter[ed]' by other minds, and (as you will see next) is the worst possibility - it is nothing.

Yet for some reason I wrote 'all windows hope for a glimpse of Hell'. I think of this I wanted to feel something that defined the nihilistic machinations of the world outside. I was desperately poor, in a loveless relationship, with a broken family and seemingly no prospects for an authentic life in a poor Northern town.

It seems I would rather see something a bit fucking terrifying than to experience life as something outside my understanding at all.

And so what now?

While I wrote several poems, it took until recently for me to revisit this dark, and immature, time.

I was running recently after traumatising my back. I was going slow as hell until I came to a slight hill. Of course, my usual engine of desire kicked in. And, of course, I was running to impress a girl (!). But this time I didn't just see her in my mind's eye admiring my physique, but rather in some words she said.

I saw her admiring 'a universe inside of [me]'.

I both experienced her admiration of me, of something within me, but not entirely of me; I experienced my admiration of myself, of that thing both inside and out; and finally I experienced my appreciation of her admiration. It filled me with passion enough to power onwards with a pace that burned my lungs.

I experienced her recently. My God.

The evening was flushed with passion and overwhelming experience. She took all of it with a knowing smile. She laughed full. She knew of her beauty, and loved it. She loved that I loved it, with free, easy acceptance. What a human being.

Regardless of what happens, and I feel there will be much happening, I wanted to write of how I experience her using a sonnet form. This is it, and these are some thoughts afterwards.

How can I feel the full of you?

***, how can I feel the full of you
When in the sun-valleys of your soul
There runs deep cut a river blue
Of my eyes that seek what once they stole. 
Through guile or malice or small boy neglect
Rich paths dried into grey boxed lines
Yet no unfettered spirit as yours pointlessly treks
And instead desires to wander beyond all signs. 
Free, over a crested hill, you behold,
A universe, a soul, spewing rainbow, 
Within the colour of life remouled
Echoing with laughs of time we borrow.
So read in these lines you knight he drew, 
The past, the now, the future you. 

So the purpose of this poem is written of my experience of her. It is of her mind, of how I know about her, and how I experience them both. It is full of hope, and yet of a keen awareness of the finite nature of time and of experience yet to be (in the words of Utter, 'endeavour').

It is in the lines of the Romanic poetry of Blake:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.

Blake here is following Socrates who decries the traditional steps that says when we feel joy (through love - eros and limerence), the next is to want that joy to last forever. However, in focusing on making that joy last forever, we risk not experiencing it as we could/should/deserve.

This poem speaks of this desire to experience the 'full' of someone's character. It praises the 'sun-dug valleys' that metaphorically evoke the character built by the warmth of life-affirming connections that cut through the land of the 'soul' like a loving glacier. Following Coleridge's drug-filled stupour (ha!) of Kubla Khan's 'might pleasure dome', within the soul is 'a blue river' that matches the colour of my eyes (in real life!).

That they 'seek' what once was 'stole' is a nod towards Rousseau's romantic narrative that we are born innocent and are corrupted by fallen humanity. In this case, the person I know is openly authentic about past hurts, and of their response. The three worldy tools that corrupt our youthful dreams are well-placed: 'guile' of self-knowing cunning against us; 'malice' of intention to hurt and exploit us; and 'small boy neglect' of the weakness of non-actualised men who rely upon the intimacy of their mothers, and who cannot love a woman as they deserve.

The 'rich paths' of life are the authentic, fulfilling life choices available to us at any time. They are reactions we choose to have. That it is too easy for these choices to 'dr[y]' into 'grey boxed lines' speaks of the disgusting ease in which the modern mind can slip into patterns of unedifying stasis. See the wonderful 'Yes Man' by Danny Wallace for a real-life example of how someone is able to move themselves from this point, and find connections, love (and laugh) in the process.

The true celebrations of the artistic spirit I experience in this individual begins in the next two lines of this second quatrain: 'no unfettered spirit...pointlessly treks'. Am I in the rat race? I am classroom teaching in a way that is wearing my body and spirit for no ultimate purpose? I have fun, but where is the joy, the true substance? The spirit I see would not 'pointlessly trek', or at least would seek not to do so... We have to pay the bills! Instead, desiring to find a world that is 'beyond all signs' is to live a life more in line with inner instinct.

The third quatrain is my favourite because it moves the respectful (gentlemanly!) foundation of admiration into current action. I said it to her...

It begins with the punched declaration, 'free'. A free soul is one unashamed to live its own rhythms. Such a soul is high, the 'crested hill' referencing the highness of royalty and public celebration. Here comes the most important line of connection, that she 'beholds' (so epic!):

1)  a 'universe...' - upon saying this I touched the beautiful chest that contained her beating heart, the universe I see inside her.
2) 'A soul...' upon this I touched my chest, the flushed part of me that she feels.
3) 'spewing rainbows...' upon saying this I touch her nose in lightful play to how she lives her art! The bodily, excessive, colouful intensity of this physical metaphor evokes the very many memes (Nyan Cat!) and other animalistic expression of language and zen silliness.

The final lines of this quatrain twist into the volta of the past and future both: that a 'life remouled' from previous Rousseauean innocence and hope is still (now?) filled with 'colour', while 'laughing' promises to 'echo' throughout 'time'. The Buddhists believed that at the heart of their impossible questions (the Zen Koan) was the desire to be playful - for one mind to follow another.

And how does her mind follow mine, and mine hers!

The resolution is Shakespearean in its meta and naked in its intention: each time she reads, or someone else, reads that poem, they read of how I experience her beauty. That experience, somewhat against Blake's assertion, makes that joy live on. However, unlike Blake's warning that we shouldn't try to fix things, it seeks instead to offer a way to revitalise the experience of one 'universe...soul' connecting with another.

In whatever sense that exists, that beautiful connection 'colours' the implicitly disturbing iridescent hard-to-fix, impossible-to-define ether of lived experience outside our mind.

This post has proved much more high-brow than I intended. The TL;DR is this: human connections are everything. The mind (especially mine!) desires way too much to find meaning and reason, and has perhaps drifted too far from just experiencing.

With shoe and beer, I lizard!

Time to Seek Again

It has been a time, a fair time, since I last committed words to this blog. I have yet to share it amongst others.

Much change, a fair change. As Briony says in Atonement of Robbie in Dunkirk, 'what really happened'?




Today I work in the Middle East. I have made an impression that benefits me. I have improved as a teacher. I read far more now than I ever have.

I appreciate that the ambitions I had for love and family did not succeed.

I appreciate that the softness of my belly and the befuddlement of my mind are things I can battle. The battle requires calm, acceptance, and diligence. A peculiar mix of vigilance and easiness.

Last night I exercised in the gym in my incredibly expensive apartment (which, of course, I did not spend as much money on as others). There is nothing to stop me doing this again, properly, and to regain a sense of physical well-being.

My heart yearns.

The ache of this blog moves beyond the remit of classroom teaching.

I see the difficult things I plan and find reasons not to follow them. But then I realise that I either do them now, or I risk dying without those encounters.

And as my friend here wisely says, seek encounters. Before I sought experiences. But I did not really realise (lol!) what that difference was.

At the moment I work from 8 until 2. This is a good amount of time for a man that was easily pushing out fourteen hour days.

I have weeks until my holiday starts in earnest; family.

Time to seek again, and maybe to let myself be sought. What for? Who the hell knows. More than this though.

More than this.

Focusing elsewhere

A friend tells me that I should post this blog elsewhere to be a voice in a pub to those wanting a little more than the domestic teaching scene in the UK. 

If this will be promoted, or not, is yet to be decided. I think it might: I would want to have read it many years ago. 

The most important thing to note about teaching abroad is this: there exists a condition that not travelling and being abroad is a choice. You might choose to be in the UK, in the place you currently teach, in a place you love, loathe, or feel somewhat indifferent about. But there is one benefit that working abroad gives you: momentum. 

I heard this weekend about some people I used to know. One had secured a job in a less-than-stellar school, and was experiencing some teething problems, the likes of which are so specific that they could identify themselves through their mentioning. Suffice to say, they were somewhat ridiculous. However, they embrace the ridiculousness, secured their official warning, and lived as they through such suffering. No one can really know how they perceived such admonishing. Maybe they enjoyed how time time they have left at the end of the day to enjoy another evening of nourishment elsewhere? Or perhaps they simply suffered these stings as best they could. 

Either which way, their focus was clearly not on the job. 

My focus is moving into the purpose of teaching, and outside the grind of bureaucracy. To do that, I think that I should seek to affirm the perceptions of that which I express, regardless of their current veracity (or not!).