Some of these works might properly belong among the other volumes, particularly Tales of Darkness, but have been grouped together here because of their common distance from my other writings. Either for their paraphrase of scientific or religious ideas, or for their grandiose oracular tone, I have compiled these here as sciences (knowings and theorizations) and auguries (revelations and prophecies)...

Index of Titles and First Lines

Sciences & Auguries

Orison

I open my book of secrets:
Behold! - a world spun dreaming,
tossing in the frenzy of a cruel-born age,
the mirror of this epoch's terrors
a-howling on the wilden roads
of the latter page of history.

Gone into a silent tongue
turned back into archaic mode
de origine mundae
and flaunted as a myth:
a private saga in the elder speech,
a-rhyming with the ancient eye
that is heritage to the lot of man.
Ages past, ages done:
the tale unfolds
and the world yet darkens.
Another kind of well-spring is fountain-bloomed*.

Behold again! - the light of never's dawn
illumines the meaning of
man's shadow.

Into the physical void,
the silver-steel and plastic soul
that is the modern craft of men
gropes to seek out empire,
and measure and conquer
planets yet unplagued by science,
their greater vanities yet immortal,
still unconquered deeper darknesses
than being's own despair.

Ere the world die,
man seeks the catapault
to launch the very stars
into his panic's coursing
from the terror of beauty's memory,
a soul newly slain
in the vain ambition
of mind and power,
a flesh-and-blood world
poisoned into a rotting lie.

Woe, for the galaxy reels
for fear of mightful man,
for fury at his agony,
for the waste that is the banishment
of haughty tongues and clever hands.

The inexpressible ever defies all words,
and the power of the drum cannot turn
aside the ending of a world.

Ages past, ages done,
ages that will never come.
What you see is what you are
Destiny is only a dim, cold star.

The pit awaits for tender man
who wrought dead his world
with care-less hand.

The book must close,
the tale commence again;
never doth the shapeless flow
into the night of this world's end.

*Hvergelmir, the Well of sorrows at the north pole of the world which is the source of the Rivers of Woe, and verily is the blood flowing from the heart of dead Ymir.

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Phoenix

Ashes of the great dream,
embers of the wall, the dome
glowing dully, scented warm
of an inner flesh:
movings in a dim reality,
shapings of a cold light
struggling in the gloom, the breach
that was the breaking
of a myth.

Fragments of silvered glass,
mirrored shards and windows unpaned
glint sharply in the greying dust,
fire's icy wings glimmering hard,
reflections lurking from a broken time.

Cold are these flames,
and dark.

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Stars

Shadows of a light that has never gone out
echoes of old explosions long-extinguished
distant gleams of lonely light

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Reverie

......and I looked at the face of the world, and I saw there great gashes, wounds from some long torment that had marred the beauty of the wild land; the mountains were more from nakedness and butchery, the forests mown as if by some great razor, the rivers choked in their gorges and made to flood the secret places of their inner canyons. The wind blew from new quarters, driven thus by the changes wrought upon the land, carrying rains poisoned with foul smokes and oils, blowing over deadened lakes and seas and streams stinking of excrement and waste. A great sadness hung over those quarters of the planet where dreams had not yet become nightmares, where the stones still stood unmoved and the greenwoods still verdant and lush; enough was already ruined of the mighties of Works that the survival of a few corners of it seemed either not possible or irrelevant. The great juggernaut of Civilization had not yet come that way, but even in the highest of the sacred plateaux, even in the most remote of the wild vales and barrens where Man had not yet dared come in great number, the ruin of the rest could be sensed in the changing winds, in the slow flux of the montane ices, in the tense sanctitude of remaining wildlife. The strains upon the Harmony were laid as great weight upon the back of the continents; ancient dragons of magma and sulfur began to stir beneath the ground, their fiery caverns preparing to unleash elemental fires and hurricanes of stone upon the land. Over the remaining acres of land and pounds of flesh that had not yet been plundered or claimed, the nations of Man continued to war, overpopulated and full of ungovernable woes. In their lust for divine power and rule of the cosmos, the priests of men had uncovered the secrets of the fabric of matter itself, and uncoiled the twistings that bound atom to atom, rock to rock, soul to soul, and from those energies devised instruments of destruction heretofore unknown to plasmic life, and far beyond any capacity to control of judiciously apply. Such power they had concentrated in the Art of War, and made it proof against their own Security, the guarantee of the own species' mortality. The third planet of an inconsequential sun whrirled silently on in its ovular course, awaiting a resolution of the forces marshalled upon its surface, a blue-oceaned jewel festooned with greensward and gold and diamond sands, sitting amidst its own ravage, awaiting destruction isolated and alone from the currents of galactic history. Into such a world was I born......

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Meteorology

Of the matter of the earth
that coiled 'round gravity's weight
below the border of the void
five categories of sustance, five realms interlocked en masse.

The Atmospheres, Winds, Airs, Weathers, Storms
essentially the external gaseous shell,
charged with static and kinetic energies
stirred by the sun and swirl of turning planet
steered by the framings of the sea and land,
the hot mountains' spines and the rivers of ice, snow, and stone.
The refractive power of the gases involved
prismatics of light to empyrean blue,
bright enough in tone to overrule the stars
and be thought a hard, closed shell
known to be the firmament
beyond which the fires of the void
and revealed to be the cosmic void-waters of the abyss,
beyond which whichever were the mysteries
of the celestial device,
machineries of wisdom divine.

The Oceans, Seas, Lakes, Rivers, Springs, Palaces of Ice, Cloud, and Snow
a compound draped in all elemental states save heaven's fire,
its rival, the mighties of all the unstrained solid
realms, a sea fermented, collected in great basins,
warring with the land's sending-forth its ancient children
in conquest (long ago, long ago were these things).
Ever yet the enemy, awe, and queen of landborn eyes
who have roamed her ways,
her wine-dark and mighty swell
or seen the eternal seige on beach and cliff.

The Mountains and Stones, the Sea Bottoms and Rocky Deeps
a mere scab upon the greater liquid metals, our planet's soul
of iron, fire, and heaven-spawn........

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Hammer-thrower

At the centre of a vortex
I remember you.
Feet turning my eyes
in a slow circle
a balanced mass spun, outreached,
my axis, my fulcrum
slow and clumsy.

I remember you;
I am awakened now;
I am in my body;
I remember the strength
of your turn,
your feet pushing force
against the heavy-iron ball
and tight-flung chain.

The weight of your eyes
calm upon the object of your throw;
shoulders taut, knotting
your brow;
your chest and mind
the load of your heart
flung over your churning back
into the sky....
....shoulders released
spin overthrown, your energy
landing at the distant mark
of your will.

I feel the power
of your calm
as my body turns
in the city night.
I remember your hands,
soft greatness grasping
the hammer of your skill;
I remember your arms
pulled from their sockets
in hurler's ecstasy.
I know the rhapsody
of your spin;
I know the hard mass
of your hurling;
my might confined
to a lightweight
brown briefcase packed
with papers, dirty clothes
and the vestiges of poems,
the off-spin of my dizzy hands.
I would know the urge
of great matter's
flight.
I would know
the song
of your hammer.

(1982)

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Exile

Man was not driven from paradise: man drives paradise from his world so that it will not remind him of the blasphemy of his existence against and outside it. Pursuing paradise with the spirit is a dream, and around the dreamers our birth-world dies. For the wild was our first home, and what was once a fair and lovely planet is now consumed for the sake of industriousness, the spawn of man's dissatisfaction with unreality and with himself; instead of changing himself, he changes the world. So much for paradise, within and without. Dare I cherish this paradise, in the world, in the heart? Yet dare I not? To cherish at all is folly and fault, let alone should paradise at last fall, and the world of our home come to its end.....

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Invocation

Out of the Big Smoke: back home
to breathe the sweet mountain air
of an early spring; the fragrant wind
of blossoms yet unburst:
the smell of moonlight.

I would tell you of my dreams,
of visions of what could be,
of what man could spin
from out the tangled world.
But you will not cherish new dreams,
you fawn to keep what is, and more to gain:
the fate that man doth spin
is the burden of the world.

Whether by a fiery rain,
or by the rising flood
that was once the ice of nevermore,
another age
will fall
to the mindless wheel
of time -
Nay, not fortune,
but ill-fortuned man.

And the cities were fraught
with excess,
with vanity,
with plunder,
the land was wracked
with mortal destiny.
And should creation thus expire
then so shall the cities fall
and so shall the waters rise,
so shall the fire burn.

Oh Lord, guide your will into my hand,
that I may set tongue to turn thy holy tide,
my heart to ride thy years of storm.

Sweet green life, spring
and forsaken, blasted root -
how many further springs
will rise from out the ancient earth?
How young is wisdom
that sees the truth
but cannot see the way
to make the world aright?

Oh, Lord, Noah walked the earth,
then sailed,
then walked the earth again......

(The Big Smoke - British Columbia colloquialism for Greater Vancouver)

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Anti-Noah
(Invocation 2)

Send down great storms, O Lord,
to purge thy world with fire!
Send great floods, O Lord,
to scourge the vain and subtle follies of this earth.
Let thy tempests rage,
Let thunder bloom full-blossomed aflame:
the drumming of the sky.
Lord, O Lord, let only few be spared
the winnowing of the field;
bring forth the oceans
from out their frozen bonds
and raze with deluge
the towers that do defy thy gates
the caverns that stoke Unholy Fire.
Send down a King, O Lord,
to teach wisdom to the lot of men!
Send down thy wrath, o heavens
at the swarming of your very walls
and the plunder of creation's Thought.

Alas, alas, for the old gods are gone:
now only Man will be his own sin's scythe.
The battle goes too long unchecked -
the host of souls sinks before time's lowing tide.
Man will yet devour man
and the earth will yet devour earth
and bloom again.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
from the earth we come,
into the earth we will return.
Vanity of vanities,
all is vanity,
saieth the preacher.....

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Transitory Satori
(An Epistemology)

Sitting in the flesh,
out of my mind,
at the borders of the self -
lost in observation, unreflection, without introspection -
looking at the tissue of my form
sitting in a common place
where many have been before
This tissue that is my self-
the mind is part of that,
an organ only, that thinks itself
more than aught or naught
or the needs of its flesh, its self

Philosophy, psychology
history, art
and the muses of my dreams
(self-fascinations of my mind,
aggrandizements of a simple purpose) -
they all have things to say
about this moment, this life

But this is my life here,
no theory, no fate,
no eternal might vanquishing
the urge of human existence;
this is my own survival,
my lone moment facing
myself in the mirrors
of my own eyes.

Externalizing the Internal,
Internalizing the External,
swapping halves of the same dream,
then waking up - into my flesh,
the moment when my self
must look upon that which
drives my mind within
(a mystery, an unfamiliarity
that the hand has never touched,
the power of the mind, its quality
holding back the body from its life)

Trying not to get lost,
in theory, in explanations,
in rationalizations, in fantasies,
in evasion of invasion
by a world, a way,
I have not dared to look upon,
at the borders of my self
(the borders of the known).

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Principia Anathematica

They tell us that Meaning has died...all well and good! For what is meaning but an illusion created by reason in its craving for reality and abstract immortality, a bad dream left over from a lack of spontaneity in the classical mind? Meaning is like someone, almost a lover, with whom one could sit on the grassy banks outside the city and detach oneself from life to try and give it orderly shape, someone who followed you around, sadly and demandingly, seeking purpose when there was no goal, eternal love when all things die.

Why should Meaning outlive its lie? For Reason could not even prove Reason, much less ideals and realities, essences and forms, what's left over after all the classifiable categories were filled. Reason could not embrace life, but only claim to surpass it in superstitious vainglory, a hybris that spelled its doom, a plague of numbers and logics that smote the heart and destroyed faith in life; Reason could not give Reason reason, Reason could find no meaning in Meaning, beauty and the soul and the essence of humanity were beyond Meaning's grasp, and reason's ken. Why then should any mourn?

To combat this, the bastard children of Reason - Mathematics, Science, Engineering, Empiricism, Technology - are copulating to give birth to a purely rational intelligence, one without life-force or the encumbrances of the humanities' useless irrationality and sentiment, one purely steel and plastic and quantified energy, one that will speak in a language beyond the human mind of things that man will never understand, that will have no understanding or respect for human life or hearts, that is the spawn of the ruin of the earth, in the name of utilizing the world's potential for nothing more than the glory of science, allowing power to run rampant over human dignity, so long as research and science's tenure are preserved. How many things it would be better that we had never known, how many horrible secretes and terrible powers have these irresponsible alchemists of thought and matter unleashed upon man and earth!

How often Reason can always find reasons to excuse its immorality (for meaning is dead, and morals are relative!), and turn and denounce myth and faith as superstition, and all the arts as lyrical illusions of unreal values, turning and twisting creativity, forcing it into boxes of theoretical aestheticism, music destroyed by mathematizing, art raped by geometry, poetry by deconstruction and concretism, philosophy by analysis and proof, the mind by compartmentalization, literature by a tyranny of commercialism, itself a darling of mathematicians and those sternfaced, emotionless eyes full of pretension to intelligence with no real hope of ever really knowing or understanding you, no sense of reality other than its own rules. That you couldn't bear to dismiss or let go because it had given so many material benefits, or scattered moments of aethereal beauty and sensuous temptations, because it looked at you with objective innocence, a distaste for human contract, just at the moment when it seemed that a merger into unity with xxx might be possible, when your life and being seemed to be clear and solid and meaning would never leave your life, and then you were left alone and cold all too often when reason refused to make sense of the irrational parts of human life, refused to admit that you yourself were real.

And now the city is empty, only full of afterthoughts of reason's presence and the bones of its actions, and the green world outside the city is full of memories of brilliant days when reason's company tricked you into seeing the earth as a fact instead of a dream, always promising to teach you to climb mountains, if only you obey its laws.

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Just Dust

Do not lead me, for I cannot be led:
I have seen the way,
and still that broken road is only dust;
the tracks thereon are swept by wind.
Roaring, blasting, stretching on and on;
these pools of thought cannot be drunk
without drunkenness
and greater thirst.

The human mask must be broken, again, and yet
for those who made the decision
of the choice to exist
leaving earth, in darkness, mountains
straining the starry sky
and still bound on this rocky earth.
Nowhere lies beyond the abyss edge
the brinking shadow of an anguished heart
To survive, to dare.....
But still,
just dust.

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Aftermath

It seems to have been easier to be an immortal fool than a mortal one: now that the change has occurred, however, there seems to be no choice on the matter for me, much as I am tempted - best say inclined - to wish and to hope for - indeed, to believe in. The urge to go over, to give myself over to the passions of the mosaic, the demonic frenzy by which I have soothed old wounds and mysteries, healed the sore on my loveless heart with diabolical salve for the diabolical hurt incurred by the same. Oh, that sounds too simple! - those words as well twist more than one way. Explanations are never ever as pat as that, and the weight of that vocabulary and special grammar is yet undiscerned: these are mysteries and privacies which the unexperienced will never comprehend the truth and lie of, no matter what they think they know, or know of - or, horrors that any should, know more than.

Even were the road of inspiration not half so dangerous as I have known it to be. Even if it could survive its modern - and timely - dilemma, even were its hellish burns not a searing enough memory, if still would beckon, still demand to be called forth. For me, alas, it is no different, nor can it ever be the same again. Whether I have been broken or released, I feel deep that there is no return, only still-seductive echoes and yearnings back into, back towards, the romantic abyss. Torn between two worlds having to use wit instead of will having to find another way than crawling into - or onto- or being crawled onto by - a fit - and having to fit off those fits with earnest alertness, and only mortal strength and will - this is my present fate.

It is less easy now to be careless, I can no longer afford the wisdom of follishness, for my folly has been infamed, its captive energies unleashed: I must learn other urges to satisfy that need...

Still, I wonder - rationally - if the world I have crossed into - or been pulled into, pushed into (pushed out of?) is not itself the demonic, that I am now tainted with an ordinary corruption and shackled with the human condition, enslaved to its bastard machineries. Everything is the truth, of course, wherever - wherever - one is, so these questions are increasingly ceasing to matter, I have simply become a human demon, that is all. And humans must have something more than magic and reason: I must learn this, now, however it may come about - or out.

There is, of course, the possibility (past experience would even say probability, but the extraordinariness of recent experience indicates this is not now so reliably so - that is to say, in the psychospiritual realm (to grope for a term); indeed that I have lost or failed, whether it was a gamble, or a battle. Pragmatic concerns indicate serious trouble, as a result of this change, though, so such a question becomes moot: I certainly can only proceed from here with controlled effort, in both areas of concern.

But since poetry and music - and perhaps language and characterization, and mad flights of historical interpretation and political divination - seem to have been the product of my infestation (introversion, convolution, call it what you will), I seem to be in a position where I have been stripped of my skill. Ironic, because it was lack of the confidence I have gained that kept me from using these talents before: now that I am myself, I possess less of the unconscious, unasked-for genius I had so often self-indulgently before. Witness that terrible beauty, I must now lecture myself, and let it go: it is no more, even though contrivance and memory may draw me to the border region of that high country. I am in still a unique position, no matter how much I have encountered my common normalcy - I am both a has-been, and an unbeen.

Still, even all that has changed may not have destroyed this. Time will not reveal this, if it is so. I may yet try to "convert" what I learned in that state, without succumbing - perhaps without the danger of succumbing - but I will never - can never - go in so far again....yet will I ever again be inhabited by such skill?? Probably not, if my understanding of the organistic mechanics here is correct....

So I am put into the position of starting over, in the most difficult way of being somebody I have never been, to whom everything is strange. This is the price for killing a demon, for embracing an angel.

At least now I can be anything - which, of course, is what I've always wanted, without knowing how, or believing....

(1982)

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