Voluntaries from the Invisibles
Douglas Milburn
Part the Eighth
Facti sunt hostes ejus in
capite,
inimici ejus locupletati sunt.
Her adversaries have become
her masters,
her enemies prosper..
--Jeremiah.
1. They know what we are
ready to head,
and when.
2. The infrequency of
significant communications
in a given era
reveals the extent to which
we have backslid into barbarity.
3. The body leads, the
mind follows.
You get in trouble
when tyrant ego tries to lead
and the body is forced to follow.
The body has its reasons
which tyrant ego can never know.
4. From Appalachian
singers
to Danish glass-blowers
to Chinese calligraphers
to Ghanian weavers
we are capable of such beauty
yet we drown the children
first in words
then in work.
5. Yes, all is water.
All is also written on the ether.
6. We have built a large
wall
of which we are quite proud
of words and other symbols
to separate us
from that which is.
But verily beyond that wall
is another infinitely larger,
impenetrable,
of silence.
7. How primitive are we?
We wrestle constantly
with the many ways
voices from the past
disturb our sleep
while remaining completely unaware of
how many voices from the future
are equally disruptive
of our ego-centered contentment.
8. Immerse yourself in
stimuli
adequate to your true,
not your temporary,
needs.
9. Humility, piety, trust:
approach them with any other shapings--
greed, vanity, lust--
and calamity--
farce, light comedy, tragedy--
results.
10. Their gifts are not
only for you
but for the world.
Shared,
their efficacy increases
exponentially.
11. Approach not as
supplicant but as mediant.
12. If you must worship,
worship the real
not the mythic.
Thrice-told tales are walls.
Trees, for example, are windows.
13. The gardener plants in the best available soil, tends, and
waits.
The gardener does not say to the seed, "Germinate now, dammit!"
14. If you inhabit a place that is no place,
a structure that is no structure,
a language that is no language,
soon enough play,
from the most inane to the cleverest,
from the merely malicious to the tragic,
seems irresistibly attractive.
15. Autofellatically we give prizes to those
who think up new ways to cope with
or reflect
the complexity and extent of received reality.
Though we may persecute or imprison
the truly clever,
we are so secure in our mental paralysis
that we no longer burn or crucify them.
16. A choice: potent or impotent reminders
of transcendence.
17. Few objects are as worthy of a scientific contemplation
as clouds.
18. I drove through a forest,
coming eventually to a dead en.
No signs, no turn-around.
I stopped, got out, walked to a barbed wire fence.
I climbed the fence and entered the forest.
Brambles and vines made the going difficult.
No birds, no wind.
Occasionally I crossed a small stream.
The water was cold, clear, and silent.
I wasnt hungry, I wasnt sleepy.
I was tired.
At one stream I turned and followed its downward flow.
I came to a creek.
I followed the creek and came to a river.
I followed the river and came to an ocean.
On the beach
I looked at the cloudless sky, the mirror-flat ocean.
I waited.
The sun didnt move.
I followed the beach to another river.
How long have I been sitting on the beach?
At least long enough to think this
and for you to read it.
19. The first step beyond received consciousness
is learning to create a larger sphere of awareness:
instead of one point of focus,
many points held simultaneously in mind.
Step two is learning to set the sphere to spinning.
20. Avoid distraction by idiot voices in the night
or idiot images in the day.
21. The Pacific turns out to be quite a bit bigger
than everybody says.
22. The selectively deaf deserve only selective applause
for their various conclusions,
no matter how clever,
based on selected data.
23. The skater skates,
delighting in the surface
and his growing mastery of it,
ignorant of the vastness beneath.
Done, he takes off the skates,
trudges home through deep snow,
and in sleep has nightmares of spring.
24. How many horrific hunts
to get us to this place?
How many,
less bloody but equally destructive,
continue today
as those above seek to secure their survival
and those below acquiesce again and again
to the closing of doors and windows?
25. I spotted a portly satyr today
seated on the top shelf of the laser printer aisle
at Office Max.
Cloven of hoof, naked of torso, hairy of thigh,
just like youd expect.
He ignored me
and I him.
26. Physical objects offer us
a variety of illusory proofs:
the rich, of their worthiness and durance
the artistic of their mastery and durance
mothers of their fertility and durance.
27. What now of those who paint with pixels
and write with eInk?
28. If you manage to get beyond language,
reporting back ceases to be possible.
That is the only fact we
on this side of the barrier
can be sure about.
The world of words is self-enclosing,
self-limiting,
and self-defining.
29. In the spiritual night
we deny the darkness
and mis-remember the day.
Watch soon the humbling effect
of the next sunrise.
30. Remember:
it was only when and exhausted and humbled Parsifal
after many misadventures
drops the reins of his horse
that he found the grail.
31. Waiting for the night to end
I huddle at the base of a lighthouse.
Others mill about in the darkness.
Some stand silent.
Above, the bright white light circles.
The ocean is calm, the sky clear.
We wait.
32. Every myth requires interpretations
of equally generosity.
33. Its difficult to say which is the bigger fake,
the hour glass or the ruler.
34. Pygmies standing on the shoulders of pygmies,
so small the seen and so vast the still unseen.
35. Taken together
the parts of this log
are just fragmentary reports
of conversations
with tiny verbal extensions
of that which is beyond language.
36. The countries and cultures
creating the see-through faux-Manhattan skylines
fail to realize that the New York skyscrapers
are only the outward and visible sign
of a dense, rich, variegated, old culture,
itself the
37. One tears fall from the third eye
and the whole world is changed.
38. What phenomena of implied pattern, scale, and complexity
do we perceive but,
like the early forebears
contemplating the movements of the sun, moon, and stars,
fail wholly to grasp in any but the simplest senses?
Dreams.
Identity.
Outrageous fortune.
Consciousness itself.
39. Its not just that one ages and gets tired
of the work involved in exploring
all possibilities.
The mind,
in its compulsive quest
for optimization,
at some point
quietly imposes
self-censorship and self-limitation:
"You dont want to try that:
youve tried something like it
many times
and it never worked."
Or:
"Excellent!
Youve tried this before
and it worked,
bringing you money, power, sex, fame.
keep doing this!"
40. Knowing not at all what we do,
wed best keep all claws retracted.
41. Received admonitory texts
deal with a limited surface here.
Some allude clumsily
to problems
arising from an extended mythic Here ("gods", "devils").
Now, like surface-bound savages,
we think to usr legerdemain
and associated devices
to enter and explore
invisible realms,
as if they were just another Mars
or another array of quarks.
42. All humans are hungry.
The deeply verbal
and those deeply immersed in symbol-manipulation
are hardly aware of their hunger
and almost complete unaware of
how to assuage it.
43. All is Potemkin Village.
44. No matter how authentic and humble
their beginnings,
all religions succumb
to the temptations of narrative
and call the result
not only virtuous but central.
45. Every culture has its figured bass,
the inventive complexity of which
determines
what is created above.
46. SETI sought cave paintings.
Larger, clevered signatures must be looked for,
such as those writ huge in light.
Proportaionate presences.
Disproportionate presences.
Atypical super-novae.
Patterns in superimposed spectra
where none are expected.
Lack of pattern where pattern is expected.
47. Disparate books we have always had with us.
This writer might collected
his disjointed sentences
and call them meditations.
Another, thoughts.
Another, fragments.
Yet another might call them separately nothing
but give each collection
a grandiose title ("Thus Spake Flibbertigibbet").
None dared illustrations.
48. The fatal human flaw
is the urge to infer duality, linearity,
causality, and narrative
where none is truly implied
or in fact exists
except as scrim.
49. So great is our need that absent genius
well praise whatever mere talent is around
as genius.
50. Wherever humans gather
they unwitting create mental fields,
transcientific expanses
of urban soils
whose size depneds on the number of minds present
and whose continuing richness
depends on the energetic exercizes of these minds.
The symbiosis of great cities and great soils.
51. No matter our fine words, art, and music,
we act is if were camels without desert,
fish without water, birds without air.
52. Music is nothing if it doesnt end.
53.Nothing you know has value or permanence
until you learn
to hear the music in silence,
to see the rainbows in darkness.
54. Day's perfect mirror breaks
time's seamless fabric rips
nightly
but we build and act
as if
the artifice of day and time
is all.
55. Wallowing in discontent
we walk about busily
having forgotten
the wings
evolution has given us.
56. Ignorant thief
I steal minutes from death
pawning them
to get this.
57. Bach alternately storms the gates of heaven
or cowers at their base
while Handel mostly dances
in a nearby meadow.
58. Belayed by self-interest
we quarantive ourselves
from the universe of true eroticism.
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the
First
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Second
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Third
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Fourth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Fifth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Sixth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Seventh
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Eighth
Leçons de Ténèbres Part the Ninth
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