A Great Doubt

A Journal

Amadán Mór

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 Copyright © Amadán Mór 2010

Cover Design Amadán Mór

Cover Art by Alan Watts (1971)
Cover Font ‘Broken 15’ by Eduardo Recife

All Right Reserved

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Preface – A stone in your shoe...
Imagine for a moment. Sitting holding a book, it doesn’t
matter what book. This one will do if you like. You were
looking for something. In an idle moment an itching,
something you forgot or omitted. Maybe the book will
remind you; maybe it will say it for you; maybe it will distract
you long enough that the itching stops. You’ll be off on your
way again in no time, until the next time. Now, what was it?
Maybe nothing, boredom? Then memory persists, vague
recollections of times when you were closer to it but, like
now, left it undone. You were closer to what? You’re in the
same fix again. Leave it, maybe that’s better. Ah, but there it
is in the bathroom mirror, in your reflection, in shop
windows, in the photographs. They keep reminding you,
keep showing up, and keep asking questions. Different
clothes, longer hair, shorter hair, looking good, looking
older, on and on. You hear yourself talking and it sounds like
someone on television, or your parents, or old friends, or
your acquaintances – hard to call them friends – they hardly

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know you, not the old you, the dormant you. You have your
badges: job title, nationality, religious affiliation, political
party, taste in music, favoured team, etc. Various likes,
dislikes, justified prejudices… you know the stuff. You tally it
up and you’re still short. It was there, it was. You switch on
the television, more re-runs of the news. A politician is
avoiding the truth and being expedient. What should I say?
More health warnings and other threats, more news of
killing, can’t get enough of it, can we? What have they
forgotten? A hundred thousand advertisements tell you how
to brand your life. They know what social group you belong
to and where your sympathies, allegiances and desires lie.
‘Tell us what we want’, you cry, and they’ll give you
something to increase your value for a while. That’s service.
Then there’s the online you to maintain: millions of users
hunched over monitors, fascinated by the light, ironing the
creases, lazily scrubbing the mat that will never be clean.
Tap, tap, tap on the little tortoise, nobody home. When
you’ve had your fix you go out into the air and reality washes
over you, the to-ing and fro-ing. Where next?
Did you postpone it? Did you push it farther away? Or did
you change by addition again? Maybe that will do; identity is
what you identify with. You are all these things added up,

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you added them up yourself. But was it all smash and grab,
were you being expedient, were you shopping for what works
and imitating it? Are you one of the unfinished people,
miming the words, making other people’s mistakes? Is that
you? No, maybe not.
Imagine then. What would it be like to lose all those
possessions that add up to the insatiable you? Why would
you want to quiet that hunger? What if you, designed by
committee that labours from morning to night with the
utmost effort, defected? You, who are always fulfilling orders,
always watched and watching, lest you deviate from the
humdrum. You, shaped by countless cues that told you what
to repeat and what to repress. What if you abandoned the
sort, rank and file mind that must have a quick answer and
solution to everything? How quiet it would be without the
facts and opinions that you mistake for truth. How far have
you gone, how much have you accepted, or lost or failed to
gain? How much have you accumulated, how heavy the load?
Your greatest burden, the weight of the past, the possessions
of the heart and the losses it never forgets. Oh, how that
burden can increase and slow the journey, how we treasure
our bag of rubbish like that is what distinguishes us. Some
love their little scars; they love to share them with the world

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or to stroke them in private, something to keep you
company.
What if the part that must always be filled is, in reality, all
you have left that is authentic? However much you fear it
and run from it, is that emptiness, not the sump of the soul,
but the source of it? Are the things you call ‘you’ the barriers
holding back the silence, your defence and the source of all
your fears? For those who build their homes within the castle
walls, lesser beasts come to prey. Your enemies are more
abundant and closer. Your fears have no flesh and bones;
they reside in everyday events of no great consequence. The
stresses of your life are less tangible, less quantifiable; your
readiness is futile against this enemy. Better camouflaged,
faster, ignoring safety routines, windows, walls and locks, it
attacks you in your home, in the night, in your sleep.
Imagine you left the safety of the castle walls, left behind its
politics and commerce, its laws and religions, its sciences and
arts, and you travelled until, by accident or amnesia, you find
a mind that has no etiquette, allegiance or motive. That may
be what you miss so deeply and search for in all the wrong
ways and in all the wrong places. It is possible, but do you
dare to make the sacrifice? Think of the consequences! No
inner authority, no agent? You might say that would be

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chaos, nihilism, anarchy. Do not confuse a mind without
commandments with a mind hungry for disorder. It does not
reject possessions, only a mind that is possessed by them;
does not reject institutions, only the people who are
possessed by them. And so many seek to possess us, to think
and answer on our behalf – have you spent one day noticing
how much? We too often lack the questions or too readily
accept other people’s answers when we should question
everything and not reject anything without question. Who
but those with answers seek to silence one with questions,
and who but one with questions may silence those with
answers? That is the reason, responsibility and morality of
one who is awake.
I am reminded of those Zen and Taoist characters. What a
pity they are so few and you are so many. They could be so
uncouth and were sometimes mistaken for madmen, drunks
or idiots and would utter a profound truth or a vulgarism
with such spontaneity that it might leave you scratching your
head as to which was which. Were they bound by
respectability and duty? They were not wantonly colliding
with social norms but simply being natural or had at least
given up a life of artifice. They were operating within society
to the degree that society could accommodate their logic but

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the questioning of social norms is why Siddhārtha abdicated,
why Jesus was crucified, why Lao Tzu went into self-imposed
exile and why Socrates refused to and was poisoned? History
has known many such people and many more it does not
record. They had the audacity to question the institutions of
the mind and the errors of thought. In the kingdom of the
blind, the one-eyed man has a fierce gaze that asks a silent,
unsettling question. How will you protect yourself from it,
how will you once more conceal your nakedness? Perhaps
you bow before him, perhaps you kill him…
Such people are travellers of a world you cannot imagine. No,
you will not find it there. You have your simple world of
utility, where would you be without that? That world of
familiarity and habit is yours to defend. That world is reality
until a new model turns it on its head. It is a work in
progress, awaiting new facts, new goals and desires, new
instructions. It is a world of labels, a world of knowledge, a
useful world, an ever receding mental construct. It is for
science to revise that work for eternity. Science has told us
things about life we cannot sense directly and has shown us
how different life is from how it appears superficially. It has
told us that what we sense is a fragment of what is but what
is cannot be reduced to symbols or completely known. What

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has knowledge added or subtracted from life? How would
those percentages run, by what measurement would you
solve that equation? Every time you read life you divide it
differently, will dividing it ever put humpty together again?
Will dividing it ever make up the difference? What Hinduism
and Buddhism call ‘attachment’ is this process whereby we
dissect life in the hope of finding completion. Such a mind
cannot enjoy what it fears to lose and fears what it wants
most of all. There’s the rub, as they say.
Take for an example art and its usefulness. Doesn’t art stand
at the pinnacle of civilization because it has no utility? Some
may try to defend its value by asserting the benefits of art to
the individual, society or the economy but are they missing
the point or trying to placate those who have no time,
patience or money for the impractical? Isn’t art cheapened
when it is functional, when it plays to the audience? Do we
want to be flattered with a poorly hidden cliché or be
presented with the cleverness of the artist? Is it art because
an ego made it or because we are told it is? Great art, in
whatever activity or medium you choose to call art, speaks
again and again as life progresses because it leaves for you to
finish that which you will only find outside it, in life. It asks
us to sense what the artist saw in a moment of insight, in

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awareness. Great art asks to be abandoned; perhaps it is not
trying to say anything at all. Must all art await the stamp of
critical acceptance, popularity or fashion? Why would
anyone pay millions to possess what will never be theirs so
cheaply? By what art did they accumulate the wealth to wear
another person’s talent and hope to know, by association
with it, the poverty that made it? Look at the institutions
that lay claim to those priceless thoughts.
Will you ever find things called truth, meaning or reality in
any institution? Will you ever find such things in pages like
these? You will find many truths, meanings and realities?
You can find new them in any culture and in the people
around you. They give you a feeling of substance and
continuity but what does this reality consist of? Have you
noticed the changing quality of it in various circumstances,
how its timbre shifts with your mood? Have you noticed how
you excite and suppress that reality and how all your
activities, how all you ‘know’ shapes how you think and feel
and consequently what you see?
Looking at life with a little learning it is easier to find what
complies with your assumptions and quickly or even
unconsciously discard or overlook almost everything else. It
is easy to become drunk on your achievements and preach or

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force others to comply with the successfulness of your logic.
It is easy to label unfamiliar ideas and, in doing so, quickly
own them, dismiss them or cheapen them. It is easy to
defend your opinions and hold to the comfort and safety of
the status quo. It is more difficult to surrender the authority
of what you know or who you are. It takes courage to change,
to admit even a small defeat and replace an old belief with
something new. How much more courage it takes to unseat
the ego and question its many certainties, to surrender them
and not find new ones.
If you can see beyond the confusion of labels, if you attend to
life with unhindered eyes, you might find that a tyrant has
been overthrown and you have acceded to that which is
profoundest and most intelligent in you. Then the mind sees
truth and error co-existing in every thought. The labels are
just labels, none are complete or true. Only awareness, that
which is not a thing, can show you what you have lived apart
from or struggled to understand in the riches of human
enquiry. In awareness we find our rest and action, can
anything be added to it that does not obstruct it?
Where is the dormant you that walks by a flickering flame
and hides from the sun? Where is that voice that so quietly
comes to you in sleep and speaks even now? Where is that

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gentle heart that curses you for learning such harsh lessons?
Beyond which guarded door lies your unspoilt love, that
untouchable core? You have been looking in the marketplace
where life taught you all things of worth are to be found.
What you have sought is as your own breath. Let it in, let it
go, again, again, again, such is movement, such is life.
Interrupting that movement produces what Lao Tzu called
‘the ten thousand things’, stalling it produces attachments,
resisting it produces fear and unhappiness. When you have
doubted all, questioned all, when you have gambled all
against the odds you will be left with nothing to call your
own. This is trust, faith, and self-belief. This many names
have pointed towards.
Now the mind is like a waterwheel that thunders with the
torrent and is a perch for passing birds when the river is still.
The turmoil is no longer the mind’s lens but a screen where
the frantic misplaced souls that are shunted to and fro by
necessity and chance are still played out; those who are in
constant dialogue and strife between what is inside them and
what outside. You wonder that this confusion still exists and
you once looked with their divided eyes.

∙∙∙∙∙

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The main part of what follows began when I was in my early
twenties (at least what is recorded here). It was an unedited,
very private outpouring that was not experienced at the time
as something positive, perhaps only necessary, unavoidable
or inevitable. The language was sometimes raw and hurried
as I tried to describe something persistent yet all too easily
obscured again. Then, in the late 1990s, it dropped off, so to
say, and that was the end of it for some years. Many of the
passages I knew by heart anyway and the experiences of
those days would occasionally drift in and out of memory, so
they were neither disturbed nor forgotten but always there
was something in them I could not account for.
In 2006 I read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. For a while it
sparked the old wandering curiosity in me. I went on to read
several books on Eastern philosophies and much else. I read
everything I once avoided when I had thought myself
discerning. Now, no longer seeking something to adorn
myself with, I enjoyed the fantastical for what it was and
appreciated the phrases that spoke to me. One book led to
another: everything from the sublime to the ridiculous to the
academic. Again and again, amidst the rhymes and riddles,
the doctrine and exercises, their themes described to me
what I had poured out, in different language, all of those

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years before. They talked of residing in the Tao (La0 Tzu),
The Unborn (Chán/Zen), Ātman (Hinduism), The Grail
(Celtic/European mythology), born in the spirit (Jesus), The
Philosopher’s Stone (alchemy), self-remembering (G. I.
Gurdjieff), positive disintegration (K. Dąbrowski). To my
mind, these seemingly disparate philosophies are unique in
their ethnic or cultural language and symbolism but in
essence they describe the same human journey. They exist
because a few human minds have tried to make sensible
something that is beyond ‘common’ sense. I will not attempt
here to sift the specifics of how or why their descriptions are
different or the same. An academic could exhaust a lifetime
discussing and verifying, building each step of the ladder by
quoting texts and experts and daring occasionally to make an
unsubstantiated leap of imagination. I could fill a book with
quotes that speak to me and add a bibliography that would
busy you for years but it is for you to find your own proof, if
you need it, and what speaks to you. At the heart of these
texts I saw common threads that sing of awakening and a
shedding of ignorance, futility, conflict and illusion. There
are many symbols and metaphors. If you approach them with
preconceptions they will always be closed to you. If you
approach with openness you might decipher them and

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comprehend the idea. If you approach with understanding
they will be transparent to you. Is it religion or science? Does
it remake you more than human or is it a realisation of
human potential? Is it a timeless, sublime overflowing that
some call bliss or a wondering movement with the mundane.
Is it found in desolate isolation or in the midst of human
affairs? Can you know where to look for it or must you
stumble upon it when the map is lost or put aside? Does it
strike you like a lightning bolt or is it something the years
teach you?
My agenda when reading these subjects was not to
differentiate them or unify them but to develop an
appreciation of why the goals of these traditions were so
similar and why they recommend to others a path to achieve
them. I would never have recommended my careless path to
another person. I used to say that if you couldn’t explain
something to a child without making a fool of yourself, then
you were talking nonsense. How could I describe all this to a
child when I had struggled to explain it to myself? It is
foolishness to try. A child has not yet learned the complex
rules that govern the adult world and the adult mind; they
still see life every day, not some dull replica of yesterday.
They have not strayed so far from unspoilt assumptions to

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accept a society that is not only rich and colourful but also
brutal. With any luck, they are still ignorant of how it can be
so stupid and can expect such stupidity of you. You need not
try and describe such things to a child because they have not
yet pillared a shelter so high on such dubious supports.
I cannot recommend the paths suggested by any system or
tradition. I cannot endorse any techniques as I have practised
none. I cannot say if they offer more than a different kind of
belonging. I can say that many of their authors have depicted
some of the most rarefied expressions of how it is to be aware
and what that journey is like. Their words are strange,
unfamiliar, easily mistaken for truisms. Imbibed deeply they
are a tonic for the favourite ailment of humankind, for its
lingering malaise, for a condition that has the indecency to
wound but not kill. These words address those who have
already begun to ask if there is any other way to be. Those
who have awoken to find a world that is not theirs, who
question its prescribed patterns of behaviour and cannot
shrug off that feeling but seek a spontaneous existence.
Those who suspect the deception they perpetrate on others –
but on themselves most of all – that these habits of thought
which they have collected describe the individual and his/her
environment. It is for those who have begun to doubt

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identity itself. Can you name a human error that was not
caused by identification with a false notion? Every day people
are offended by abstractions or assert their own. Ambitions,
relationships, human lives have risen and fallen like
fireworks on misplaced identity. We obstruct so much that is
sensible and allow so much that harms us.
For me, all of this literature was at the same time an
affirmation and a dismissal of what I had thought a very
individual experience. My private document was, after all,
public knowledge. Every spontaneous expression had been
written many times before and more profoundly and
beautifully than I could have described it. Yet in them I
found a reason to remove the last burden, that of silence.
Why should one person question another’s choices? Can you
know why they made those choices or what they see that you
do not? Do you know where their path leads or where your
own does? Yet isn’t the scourge of identity that we will not
let people choose for themselves, that what we do not
understand in others is a persistent irritation. We would
consign others to a life of unhappiness to satisfy our second
hand principles. We would leave life’s only satisfaction that
they, like us, follow the many, lost to time, wearing the knees

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out of our trousers. We are, different or the same, finding
ways to be.
What if the kindest insult we can raise is to frustrate
assertions and prejudices at every turn, whether by a friendly
joke to the well-meaning or by curt shock of logic to the
arrogant. What if the best we can do is to pour ice on the
warm waters of conformity? What if the best we can do is to
proclaim, by example, that life is not blunt, unformed
material to be flattened and beaten into shape and bent to
human will. Life is a sharp, subtle, sophisticated thing that
requires the hands of an artist, hands that know when to
push and when to yield to the material. Do you have that
bold, faithful touch? Do you employ that art?
A book is perhaps the most direct way to reach minds like
the one at work here. A book is sought out, willingly and
actively participated in and can be discarded at any time. I
know now that many have had experiences similar to what is
described here and many have responded differently and
been compelled to file it in some cultural niche or claim
some prize. To do so would be to turn away at the defining
moment or to bargain awareness for a more distinguished
illusion. It is interesting and compelling to find comparisons
but it is a hesitant mind that finds only fragments of

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familiarity. Anyone might find niches for the metaphors, but
there are none to file away what they describe, that
indefinable sense that, like a wild flower, only lives in you
and fades as soon as you try to give it to another.
For me, it will never belong to any religious, philosophical or
cultural tradition – it was fundamentally a relinquishing of
such things, and in time realising that was not a loss. As I
wrote then, stay broken, wholeness is a mask. Yet nothing is
wanting in that which you do not seek to complete, perfect
or make use of. For anyone like me, that realisation never
comes until you have tried so hard, plumbed so deep, been
shaken so utterly, that the keenness of your seeking mind
destroys all that you identified with. Better to find – if there
are any – gentler, safer ways to that repose. By it, lostless,
ungained, insperate.

∙∙∙∙∙

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The mind turns back to imagine an empty harbour and a
readymade vessel of inadequate design, over-laden with duty
and doctrine, art and literature. Imagine the drama of its
failed launch into disputed waters, watch as it pitches wildly,
clumsily sloughing its cargo before, by some uncertain
fortune, it rights itself. Imagine its impudent silhouette
drifting out to sea, the otiose nobility of it.
Here is that process then, in earnest, gathered from pocket
sketch pads. I have tried and failed to order them
chronologically but this is of no consequence. The Lament
was written retrospectively in 1998 using various fragments
from the previous years and I have broken this up again to
fill in the blanks to some extent. Other fragments I have used
in this preface. I have given titles to those entries that had
none and have added a short introduction, Setting the Scene.
Try to see beyond the pomp and wordage, see beyond
readings and perhaps you might glimpse, or remember, the
discarded, useless and unremarkable.

Amadán Mór
May 2010

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The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be
single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
Matthew 6:22 (KJV)

At the bottom of great doubt lies great awakening. If you

doubt fully, you will awaken fully.
Hakuin

From the withered tree, a flower blooms.

Zen Proverb

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20
Setting the Scene
It is morning, for example. Amidst the life-seeking and soul-
searching glory of this city, division is painted in primary
colours. The news will tell us the score if we bother to look at
it today.
The terrace houses my friends and I live in date from the late
years of the 19th century. The decor was modern in nineteen
seventy-something. A brown, once vibrantly ornate carpet,
worn flat; brown and orange striped wool curtains; a sofa
covered in similar material that would look as handsome on
top of a skip but it gave up the ghost years ago and the
absence of sound spring or beam makes it as comfortable as a
deck chair to sit on and a hammock to sleep on. Lampshades
in paisley patterns of red, cream and, yes, brown. The walls
although plain have nonetheless been jazzed up with African
silks, postcards and art prints. The whole place is scattered
with battered paperback editions of the best writers to
elevate or trash the English language, stacks of cassette tapes,
CDs and LPs of equally rare taste. The table is a shanty town
of cigarette boxes, tobacco pouches and strewn papers. There
are at least two full ashtrays (stolen from a pub) and another
two receptacles of uncertain function that are known to all as
ashtrays. They jostle for space amongst every mug and glass

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the house possesses and wine bottles and beer cans. Two
guitars lean, one against a chair, the other on a pile of coats.
Somebody I’ve never seen before walks past to put the kettle
on and we chat. Daylight enters via the kitchen – the curtains
are rarely drawn in the living room this early – it ruins the
ambience and calls morning a little too abruptly. When they
are opened the den-like cosiness of it all looks vacant and
untidy.
The many people who come and go here are a mix of
professionals, unemployed and students, mostly students.
Everyone is in revolt against something, becoming
something. We all have a talent, be it mad or sublime. It may
be for art or music, a quick wit, a curious turn of phrase or
some less definable eccentricity of personality. Anyone else is
just taking up space. We talk a lot, here, or in quiet pubs, on
into the early hours, flushing the nonsense and running with
a good concept until we’re going in circles and call it a night.
Everyone seems to know something you’ve never
encountered before. We are all experts in politics and
religion but speak of neither. There is always something
happening, a session, a gig, an excursion. The less notice, the
better; we find the money somehow and we share what we
can’t afford. If all else fails, we go out in yesterday’s clothes

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and see what happens; maybe nothing, but there’s a fair
chance we’ll bump into someone with a plan.
Between times I’m out, walking for miles around galleries
and gardens, detouring through unfamiliar streets to see
where it takes me, and then on to another house. None of
them are a home but all are familiar and welcoming and all
the while, inside, something uninvited calls. When it’s quiet
and the words come, I write them down.

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24
 1993

Morning Train
The alarm wakes me at 4:45 in the dark attic. This is not my
room. This is not my bed or my memories on these walls. It
is cold. The sea roars at the shore, the timeless, ceaseless sea
roars at the shore. The wind pushes and pulls, rattling the
wooden walls and windows and the lampposts along the
promenade that ring like cowbells. The whole house is
asleep, huddled and dreaming. I get out of bed, pack and
creep downstairs and into the living room. I step over and
around the scattered litter and possessions of whoever came
and went or stayed last night. One of the girls is sleeping on
the sofa by the door. I pause and look down as I leave. She
wakes and looks up in fear at the silhouette in the doorway
and the sea, suddenly, alarmingly loud. I whisper consolingly
and go quickly up to the road, crunching gravel, disturbed by
the fright on her face. I am alone. No living thing stirs, the
streets are deserted, the houses still. I pass a building site, a

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crane’s long arm lies outstretched and bent, its claw cupped
towards an abandoned head, the compass views from its
cabin boarded with no view of the broken red clay, the junk,
the unfinished walls graffitied with clichés of who loves who,
supports who, hates who. I hear something and look around
and notice a seabird lies dead in the rubble, no obvious sign
of a crime. I wonder if it might have just died, its heartbeats
having counted out, and drifted, silently dropped and thud
into a ready-made bombsite with only me as a witness. I
hurry on and catch the early train and sit in an empty
carriage. We move off along the coast and into the
countryside, beyond the day, behind the night. Cows stand in
fields of mist, only a breath of colour in dawn’s cold blue
light. More fields, hedges and fields, hedges and fields.
Calmly, the day arrived and everything, everyone moves in
accord with that feeling.

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 1995 – 1998

The Lament I
Only a traveller can tell the story of a winter’s sleep, only a
traveller can awake to a world where a fraction of what exists
there can be communicated. Only a traveller must venture to
cast a quick, cold eye into the unretrievance and imagine for
them the journeying feet that have set astray and may once
more discover a road beneath them, a geography around
them and a horizon as a place to return to. Nameless, they
are so many and so many later it is hard to distinguish the
form I take from those I serve.

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Note To Self
Exhausting energy, tearing at the disposition for meaning.
Alone in the skull, always reaching out. What else but to
extinguish the light and halt the march of duty on desire.
Finding time to evaluate experience, to educate my instincts.
Time in the world interior to that I touch. That inner world
so often polluted by fear and the threat of isolation. Out
amongst friends again, living at the boundaries where our
inner worlds meet and action is not dictated. Still too often
found outside the garden by the temptation to possess it or
be possessed.

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Where Now
Where can I direct this?
This gaunt animal existence;
Where something this bright evening?
My soul burns constant,
With all the air to nourish it,
No wind disturbs it.
And doesn't it happen like this?
That I have nowhere to take this,
No one, not yet,
So here I sit,
On my bed,
Writing,
To not be led,
Staring and blank,
To the sugar water fish bowl.
Quit now before the text spirals,
As all of life moves ever on,
Now and now but never so far away,
Never beyond a glance this way or there.
So here a page and a little more ink,
I let it rest here.

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Roundelay
How is this and do you like this?
Difference is movement,
Again only different.

And enough this?

Do I become less if it is?

Perfect? No, but better?
Again, when is it ever?

Enough ever?

Again and on, on from the same.

Where now? Again or on?
Good now and bad now and why?

To move enough?

Oh roundelay, sing a new refrain.

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Sing!
Sing for god’s sake, gild this rust, tinsel this junk, draw little
pictures, delicately colour some damned story of how it is.
Breathe a sigh in recognition of all the verbose homages to
disappointment, loss, misfortune, humble acceptance and
subsequent gratitude. Smirk at the self-same who suffer from
terminal adolescence and call it the bittersweet fruit of
experience. Build shoddy edifices of filth, sculpt rank tributes
in the name of truth and beauty. You fool, you've too much
talent to be bored, it's ennui, existential angst. You're the soil
that feeds the rose-petalled ignorance of their so-called
'society' man! Join in the wish-fulfilment, join the thrashing
egos, join the tourists – all mere currency, dealing and being
dealt, aye sing!

31
Another Monologue
Remember again, after the words, the atmosphere, the
moments, glimpsing me as I can only imagine, in a trance,
head bowed, talking from, about those spaces, points of
meaning and connection. Your face and all possible others
my guide as to whom I confess. I give them this character’s
voice, his truth. I sit back and listen too, estranged. It's
difficult to distinguish if this is clarity, words coming truly
from myself, or am I performing some ritual, ripping the veil
of familiarity from your eyes, transported to a temporal
landscape, plundering the tabernacle of your soul, weaving a
tapestry of words to pigment the pale print of experience?
Questions come through and the voice continues, the words
pour forth, drawing your arid ears to me, splashing, burning,
invigorating. A series of gestures sear the air, I conjure your
pain, scatter your doubt, here is real intent. I exploit the
space we occupy, borrow movement, change, become some
figure constructed from within, my outer self-forgotten
again. I am different now, aware of this new dimension of
tongue and breath, the thickness of voice, the thinness of air.
Meaning cannot be framed in this hypnotic, out-of-time
experience, lost in lostness. No, not that, immersed in
fluidity. I glance up for a moment, into your smooth blue

32
grey eyes, deep into the darkness, closer now to me each
time. Words conclude, a drink is taken, a cigarette lit, a long
breath and silence. Notice now the glass, the sensation of
smoke-filled lungs, of table, walls, decor, bodies, people, a
restrained passing look, a casual remark or joke. Tonight this
keeps you warm, disturbs your sleep.

33
The Lament II
Is it my story? It feels like my own as I approach it. Or is it
theirs or some distant self, in another life, speaking to me in
ways I never learned, of things I never saw, or experienced or
could translate? Some dusk I hope it leads me to a Golgotha
where I can bury these thoughts. In an age from then some
creature may find a welcome shelter there and come and go
as it pleases. Until that uncertain time this graven head fiend
warms its walls, sweeps its floor and settles down, charged
with a duty beyond achievement.
And still it rains, still I’m quickened, still the words come and
go, thus...
Like origami unfolded I lay this fictional life bare, my mind a
canvas, this canvas a lens. For years I looked on tainted
reflections of life and through them at my own. It was my
blighted birthright, from the cradle to the lull of ritual. A
world at once perfect, yet where morals are policed by the
devils you know, and so to preserve them. All fallen before an
impossible mystery, hunched over their incantations with the
burden of the Cyrenean, another payment on a mortgaged
soul. The cold stone walls reverberate with creaking cartilage
and the idle engine of want.

34
Spellbound
Textful days, page filled, turned to, lived with. I behaved with
their stiff-collared sang-froid, their intellectualism, the dry
stoical eye and protracted lips. Poised, waiting for the banal
traffic of clapped-out ideas to halt before the peacock struts
his oh so sweeping statements and pretty ideas.
Uncertainties embellished on high, raised to axiomatic
status, reduced to mere decoration to disguise the dust that
gathers about their heart, that quickens the pulse and clouds
the brain, the cataract that obscures true observation,
acceptance, and understanding.
Perhaps I’ve gazed too long at these tainted reflections and
through them at my own.
What have I to say now?

35
Waiting
Here you are laid bare, observed half-hidden and unresolved.
Prostrate, here, and still, over-exposed in pale light.
Emaciated vigour, shivering limbs all unfolded. Your flimsy
bandages would fall away at the gentlest touch. Some subtle
suggestion binds them to you, creating an illusion of
wholeness, from a distance, of vitality.

36
Something Unspoken
Sitting there at rest,
Again aware of,
The uninvited,
From the dark of sleep,
Still the residue,
Grown in the quiet.
It crawls up your throat,
Choking utterance.
Will to equal it,
So unconvincing.
If I could catch it,
Night sleeping or day dreaming,
As it caught and catches me,
Then no more the enemy.

37
Wordscoming
s a t i n d a r k o f n i g h t s h a
d e a n d s h a d o w s w a i t i n g
o n w o r d s i n a r t i c u l a t i
o n m o d e a c t i v a t e d p o s s
i b l y a s u i t c l o s e t o c h e
s t a r t f u l l y s c r i b e u n d
e s c r i b a b l e i n c h i l d l i
k e u n f r e e f o r m l e s s b o r
e d o m t o b e a m a n g l e a m a z
e i n m i n d l e t i t i n e r r a n
t h o u s e d a t e k n o w l e d g e
o f n e g a t i o n w i n c e d f r o
m n e v e r a g a i n p o i s o n e d

38
The Precipice
It comes most readily in that relaxed early morning or late
night, lethargy giving way to lucidity, fuelled with a little
nicotine.
Standing on the precipice of delirium, looking ahead and not
below and giddy at the expanse of possible thought. Then I
might sleep, my head a heavy stone and so embedded with
things that it is hard to extract from it, to keep its heart
molten, fluid in wakefulness. Creating something to carry
with me, those thoughts, that mood, to garnish the day, add
wonder to sense. You grab what windows of presence you
can, wrought from a sea of absence, furnished from the swell
of reverie.

39
Fugnose
ssiskin holyboo rickety doo wumph rinkle here de bee
woncen singadink ristle a kingshin dona betta comsir teta
bloom sang a ring du bope singe righty ho here we go a word
in year pease ach but werze me words gong sensa silly billyo
hmmnn shhha fink man fink yah I mean to say away now
here you oh you high blink yes yes lovelovelove and sunny
plexus tickle wehe shup pu pup nyin woh there chool me
mema sinky now we go aho what ayou yew saying to me
gotta go werd you comfrum yer hear now now bybye though
uhu ok bumpt into some old finker must be mad nowsee
howhee fought

40
The Lament III
He says that you will soon leave this place you're in, this
place that is his day and night. These thoughts that bear you
up weigh him down. Who will assist one who walks alone,
collecting more dust than he can shake off as he travels
amongst the weary and weakens? I began to acknowledge in
them that which I had commanded without, denied within.
Wisdom falters, courage fails.
Star-guided through the dark trenches of the mind, a guide
to those who fall from one who never leaves, who lives to
explore its alleys and secret avenues, its cellars, its vistas, its
exits. He dreams of escape but has found no one the equal of
these walls, so rich with the idleness of a species. Unlike
most but like a few, he came willingly, in search of
something meaningful. He dreams of an old country but it is
his duty now, to these recesses of the mind to weigh in words
the burden of those he's read, to walk paths under new stars,
where no thought or image is written and no answer given,
and write his own there. This last part of your journey is
yours alone.

41
The Road to Lessness
Fields of coarse tobacco, dusk’s light ribbons between hills of
white pepper and gunpowder. Shaved trees reach out to the
heaving clouds for nourishment, autumn’s confetti about
their feet. No faint life but my own silently visits.

Resolve
Such a bitter sleep was my sleep because I am asked to
dream, to unthinking dream, unthinking remember,
unthinking forget. But it is not unthinking through this pain
I go.

42
Revolt
Torn from the living, in that boundless silence, my errant
imagination exhumes the monstrous voices that had once
been my stay, once welcomed. Now run amok, they indulge
themselves. The more I struggle to contain them, the more
they exert their influence, their power over me.
If these creatures destroy you it is by your hand. This is the
self-destructive ego realised, your terrible conscience, and
with the courage of purgation, you must accept its anger and
its judgement. This is your revenge against your own foolish
hopes.

Consumed
Caught in the blaze, transfixed, in abandon, in some drunken
haze of annihilation. Wanting at some dark, mute level,
screaming to be purged by the light that rushes to consume
me, can I fix it in my gaze?

43
Little Robin
Little robin sees the sky,
Just beyond the windowpane,
A narrow gap from the air,
Panics as I try to help,
Fluttering about my face.
I hold my breath and grasp it,
No need to be frightened now,
Open! Out! Take into the air!
My quiet breath, quiet breath.

44
The Unretrievance
A heaving and sighing sea pours into a black vortex. I am
pulled around its all-consuming centre. Crashing around me
are the possessions that once crowded my room; the books,
the art, the trophies and trinkets. I half-swim, half-grab
amongst them for something to keep me afloat, but watch
helpless as one by one they are torn from me. In that loss
something thunders and cracks, a high-speed flickering reel
of images, beyond my conscious grasping, rush, flush from
my crowded mind, on and on. My body turns silently, vacant,
transfixed by the total destruction, stripped bare, utterly
alone. Is this madness, what is there now? My brains are
barren stuff, a tissue of thoughts feeling substantial and what
is that to lose?

Void
A matt black globe courses timelessly, a figment of
nothingness. Grim gouged sockets gaze oblivious after the
perished seed that founders in the vast intangible.
Amen, he sweeps the void about his skirts.

45
Twilight
An aura of suspension gathers around you, lungs leaden with
sluggish air. Thought yielding now, thickening flow, velvet
dark silt stirs. Beneath a heavy brow eyes burn a myopic
flame, pupils pulse and eclipse, a halo of shifting autumnal
colours. Fluttering lips frame a traitorous kiss and taste again
the quickening.

46
Lotus
My eyes unhooded, besotted,
I have again my nothing.
Aweigh in this unfathomable,
Black rags reel in a balmy sky.
A draught of ethereal air enters,
A horse croaking accompanies,
My crying breath cast out.
I shudder, cough and vomit,
Grubs fall from my lips.
A fading obligation orbits my skull,
Some tourniquet constricts my brow.
One hand claws the earth;
I wipe my mouth with the other clenched fist,
Tawny skin, black nails,
Rotting cloth hangs from my wrist.
I arise automatic,
Spilling petals and twigs,
Limbs carry me to the roots of a tree.
I begin again the urbane ritual,
My clothes fall about my knees,
I bathe the scars of the plough,
Behold the face turning, returning.

47
I am a stranger to the watcher,
The flick of his liquorice tongue,
'I am the world’s fugitive, what beckons me?'

48
The Lament IV
From this mirror to the world where desire is acted out am I
gone and lost a thousand times, and these words, my guide
and sometime tormentor, beyond me for how long? I
unknotted a tangled soul that some colour might illuminate
this damned story borne of listless passion and the whey of
idealism. Such a fiction I dared to dream and gaze and watch
it turn so rotten and twilight come too soon. Who is such a
man but a dream made flesh and so easily forgotten?

49
50
 1999

Spring I
Crisp and crash towards blue sky, walking amidst the
rooftops, in easy reach of the mountains, clear in the near
distance. Elevated and quickened by the sweet cold air on
raspberry tongue and silken lung. Experiencing the touch of
all the colour of the world, bathed in calm scent and a
narrative of textures, and the only sounds, welcome
punctuations and stirrings of occasional thoughts of no
urgent consequence that drift off amidst the immediacy of a
soul sensing day dusking.

51
Spring II
The weather decides the mood today; hazy mountains, milk-
white sunless sky, and the air soft and warm. I head for home
through the quiet suburban avenues; the occasional car
passes slowly, the sound of tyres on tarmac most audible.
Looking into dark interiors: this one someone sitting at a
table, this one preserved for guests, this one a study lined
with books obscured by large plants. Across the junction and
past the cottages with their shuttered windows, wooden
garages and trees with twisted trunks and blossoming in
orange and pink and lavender, the birds hidden and singing
among the branches. On past The Lyric and across the river,
singing aloud. Long rows of terraced houses and narrow
alleyways and to the house. Out again in no time and no
buses around so walking again, another bridge downriver,
looking at the slow rippling water. Past the old house on the
corner, ruined render and brickwork, windowless, great tufts
of grass on its sills; a pigeon struts along its chimney top.
Into town, detouring by the old church; flowers are being
brought in. Good day for it. Sounds of workers on a new
construction; I look in through the green gauze and the dust,
lamps dimly illuminating progress. Through the market,
switching off the chatter of the people strolling, sitting

52
around. Enjoyed the eyes of a friend for a few minutes and
then on to the union; sat in that little cavern with coffee and
cigarettes. A day when the tide comes in over memories, a
stirring calm, a thought to how I was and how it ended. It is
spring, life is in the air, everywhere, between the bricks of the
old house, in the trees nesting. Faces awake from winter.

53
Graduate
You wouldn't recognize this picture. The overlapping
shadows of fifteen hundred lights on a clear ocean of floor
and some hundred bodies cling to the walls in the same
stupid costume and then I see you across the hall in that
green silk dress, like a beacon. I set out, my body some alien
extension, out of sight, in manual control beneath tunnel
vision. The incomprehensible expanse around me bulges,
exerts arbitrary elastic forces on my limbs. Flapping trouser
legs with clown feet kick imaginary footballs with each step,
stifling shirt with swinging baboon arms, my long neck sways
to a charmer’s tune, my indecisive facial muscles, the
peculiar angles they choose when I glance three-quarters in a
mirror. Her face at last and her smile, I hang on it like
washing and casually say hi.

54
 2000

Open window
Out of the emptiness a voice without substance, an image
develops of such simplicity; a vast sky where the clouds have
paused for a moment. The trees cut out in the foreground
seem to share the same repose. A slow tide of grass, a
glistening stream, the shifting shapes of fish swimming
beneath the surface. A flower grows alone, it is an impossible
blue. It awakens me to the cold red clay on my feet. I stand
weightlessly erect, my clothes shifting with the complex
rhythm of the breeze. I see this from a distance and close my
eyes, feel the movement of the trees. Petals, soft as
snowflakes, drift slower than gravity, slower than time to the
earth. Their perfume, an unnameable sensation, fills my
chest, an energy that reaches into my temples, releasing
tears. Inhale. My warmth is emptied, filled with cold air. The
sun shines warm on my skin, on the earth, wanting through
the mist the frosted hills. Feel my hands through my hair and

55
exhale, watch as I walk, the brush of grass sweeps and sways
around me, erasing my path, silent as the breeze.

56
 2006 – 2010

Easter Story
It is evening. A young man sits with his back to a tree, head
bowed. Hearing footsteps, he looks up to see a girl running
back to the group. She has left an egg on the ground. He
smiles and lifts it in his hand; it is quite hot. With adept
hands he cracks a large piece of shell away and plucks out the
cooked egg and eats. This is his first meal today. He feels the
dust, blown by the wind, speckle his face. He looks up at the
first few stars of the night. The same dust freckles the inside
of the eggshell still in his hand. He smiles and quietly
watches the group sitting around, a couple here watching
him curiously, others chatting, laughing, singing. This is a
story for tomorrow perhaps.
The professor sits in the old leather armchair in his study.
On a few shelves here are his published essays, articles and
books. The remainder of the wall is filled with the classic and
contemporary works of various sciences and photos with him

57
alongside some of the authors of these. A little girl rushes in
and stops at a respectful distance, ‘Happy Easter, granddad’.
He smiles, ‘thank you, darling’ and off she runs. He has never
been fond of chocolate and opens the large bottom drawer of
his desk. There are two thick folders to one side where neatly
filed are years of work that once scattered less prosperous
walls and desks and he knows now will never be completed.
He gives these the faintest glance and decides not to put
away the gift. He unwraps the foil and presses the thick
chocolate with his frail hands; nothing. He smashes it with
his fist, collapsing a quarter of the shell. He picks out the
larger pieces and looks in at the smooth interior of the shell
and a little pile of colourful, sugar-coated sweets. He looks
up and out at the garden and, uncharacteristically,
inexplicably, he shudders, sobs bitterly.

58
The Potter
Once there was a potter whose daughter announced that she
was to marry in three months’ time. He decided that he
would gift her a beautiful storage jar with the most elaborate
ornamentation his craft had taught him and the finest paints
he could afford. In the quiet of the evening, after his day’s
work was complete, he would continue with his masterpiece
whilst his old blind dog slept by his feet. When tiredness
danced in his head, he would place it on the workbench and
cover it with a cloth in case his daughter might see it and
spoil the surprise. After two months the jar had been fired
and the delicately painted relief work was nearing
completion. He stepped back to admire his work and woke
the old dog that must have been dreaming. It leapt up in
fright and ran blindly about the workshop crashing into the
workbench. The man watched, frozen in horror, as the jar fell
and was impaled on a pair of tongs. He picked it up and
looked at the glow from his lamp through neat holes
punched in each side. He sat it down and screamed from the
soles of his feet, ‘Come here so I can kill you’, but the dog was
gone. It would know better than to return tonight.
For days the man could not bear to enter his workshop. He
cancelled all orders, telling his clients that he had taken ill.

59
He was ill, consumed with anger, frustration and self-pity.
He found it impossible to share the excitement of the
wedding preparations. Consolations were silenced with more
anger. In one such moment he sat alone in the garden when
his turmoil was disturbed by a gentle humming. How can
that woman be so happy, he thought, can I not have a
minute’s peace? ‘Shut up in there, will you?’, but still it
continued. He stormed into the house, searching from room
to room. No one was home except his dog, which shrank
from a dismissive boot. He paused by the workshop, I’ve told
them a hundred times not to go in here. Opening the door,
familiar smells greeted him, familiar quiet, familiar
apparatus, tools waiting expectantly. Then again, the simple
music stirred the air. He followed the source of it to the open
window in his workshop. There sat the jar on the windowsill.
He stood before it, thinking of the hours he laboured over it;
it was beautiful but ruined. ‘Not even fit for a pisspot’, he
muttered in disgust. For the third time the song came and in
amazement he realised what it was. The wind breathed
through the jar and with its subtle shift in direction the pitch
rose and fell. In a moment his shattered contentment was
made good and his work complete. ‘Come here so I can kiss
you’ he cried, rushing out of the door. The poor animal,

60
thinking him insane, fled from the house and his master still
in pursuit, laughing uncontrollably.
That evening the potter sat down and carefully applied
precious leaf; golden rays of the sun emitting from one side
of the jar and a silver halo of moonlight on the other. ‘What
luck that was’, he wondered. The old blind dog shrugged its
eyebrows.

61
The Blade
Some see only a story and read no meaning
Some think it unremarkable and never seek it
Some think it foolish and mock the mention of it
Some think it evil and chasten against it
Some worship it beyond comprehension
Some follow it but it leaves no path
Some claim to know it and sell the dream of it
Some sensed its presence and fear the memory of it
Some it has touched and made mad
None have stolen it or bought or won it
It brings no rewards though all seek its treasures
It has no power yet no effort can equal it
It is not in memory and not in hope
It is not in want or reckoning
It is passed to none yet to anyone found
It cannot be owned yet all possess it
It renders whole those who receive it
It rents asunder those who resist it
Any may ignore it but none escape it

62
Haiku
Loose the fool upon your back
Throw your stinking corpse
Rest pilgrim, rest weary ass

63
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