Konya, Rumi and the departure from Troy

I've now been travelling for 45 days. So not very long then. One and a half months definitely sounds longer. I've been in my currrent country of passage, Turkey, nine days. So far I've been to Istanbul, Gallipoli, Troy, Pergmon, Ephesus (Selcuk), Pammakale (and Hierapolis), Eigirdir and now Konya. I'll probably stay in Turkey another week or two - though nothing's certain. Here, in Konya, the deathplace of the famous Rumi, I pause to meditate on the life, poetry and dancing of a man whose productions seem as popular in California as in Iran. This afternoon I suspend sightseeing and my tendency to wander from cafe to cafe, taking far too many photos, and rest in this very pleasant Hotel Ulusan before, tomorrow, visiting the museum devoted to this Islamic transnational hero. The Turks call him Mevlana- meaning 'our guide', whilst many in the west might like to think of him as our kind of Muslim, i.e not much of a Muslim at all.

As it happens, the Orthodox Muslim community accepts, if it doesn't embrace, the man. Though to some his inclusive, potentially heretical ideas must seem a bit lax. For example:

'Come, whoever you may be ,
Even if you may be
An infidel, a pagan, or a fireworshipper, come.
Ours is not a brotherhood of despair.'

I have read next to nothing of his work but I especially like these lines (courtesy of Wikipedia):

'Listen to the reed and the tale it tells,
How it sings of separation.'

and....

'How doest thou know what sort of king I have within me as companion?
Do not cast thy glance upon my golden face, for I have iron legs.'

Tomorrow in the evening after the museum I'm to see the 'Whirling Dervishes', whom I was reassured to learn from a Gentleman in Ephesus, are actually the real deal here, not the fake troupe you find in Istanbul. That's nice to know. I'm looking forward to the aesthetic spectacle of course- one that apparently decodes as the attempt to transfer God's loving energies from the divine to the human level- but I also go out of curiosity about a group that had such a big impact on one of my most influential teenage idols - George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, the Greek Armenian philosopher who taught that we're all asleep and enslaved by our mechanical associations and reactions.

Looking back now on my pre-Konya days, I left off at Troy. From here I took the tour bus to Selcuk but got off at the ancient city of Pergamon. Here I said goodbye to the delightful Emily, an American student bound for Damascus who, besides being funny and vivid and interesting to talk to, was a shining refutation of the stereotypical dumb-assed, culturally myopic, bumble-gum-brained American one is supposed to encounter, but which in fact I never have. I may catch up with her in Syria, that is if I go there. This will depend on whether I get whisked away by the God of Work (what name shall we give him?) to work in some desert or other, such as Kuwait (for example- Saudi having died a death by terror in my mind, so it seems, thanks largely to the stark warnings of a librarian I virtually met and who works at the place that wants to employ me), or else somewhere more attractive and less lucrative. It may also depend on the question of visas and how difficult it is to get them (nobody seems to know), and on whether and for how long I get sidetracked in Eastern Turkey and Georgia.

In Pergamon (now called Bergama) I stayed with the silently bookish Ersin at the Odyssey Guest House. In each of the quaint rooms a copy of Homer's 'The Odyssey' is left out in thematic echo of the establishment's name. I picked up Ian McEwan's 'Saturday' as a part of his well stocked book exchange program, and gave up my 'Cafe Europe' about life in post-soviet Eastern Europe, which I'd finished. Inside the cover of each of his books he has stamped a message saying that this book started its voyage in his guesthouse and inviting the reader to stay. A wonderful touch I thought. I'd have liked to have had more of an however pigeony-english chat with him, but alas he was very distant. In the morning I got the first of my two unsolicited motorbike lifts, up the very long road to the Acropolis.

As usual, as in Greece and the Balkans, the ruins date back to pre-Alexandrian times and as usual the better preserved ones, and therefore the more interesting to look at and the better to clamber over, were the younger Roman ones. After a point there's not much you can say about Classical ruins if one isn't to become too stilted. What I can say is that the sheer height of the mountain on which ancient Pergamon sits sit sold it very well, and that whilst Pergamon was perhaps fractionally less impressive than Hierapolis, which I was to see later at Pammakale, both just couldn't compete with Ephesus, which is by far the best set of ruins I've seen anywhere, barring perhaps the Palatine Hill area in Rome and the Parthenon itself.

The best that is, if you can persuade your mind to factor out the torrents of tourists and the avalanche of tour buses that surround and infiltrate Ephesus. If you can't, you'll probably prefer Pergamon or Hierapolis, even though they have no Library of Celsus, just because the modern masses are thin on the ground. Like I, you might find yourself at St.Philips Tomb at Hierapolis, with not a soul in sight, expept for those of a mountain goat and friendly archeologists working away, offering water to an Englishman who had climbed to a site most tourists don't bother to (sorry Philip, you needed to write a non-heretical Gospel to get the attention John does).

In Pergamon I met Kiya, a Kiwi English teacher teaching in Dubai. She gave me useful teaching work finding tips and listened to my uncertainties. She said people in the Gulf are 'not nice' but that you can have a good life out there with the ex pats and etc...and of course the money. As usual she had little to say to recommend the region other than the money - and this was Dubai she was speaking about, not Saudi. She said I looked a bit uptight, or somethinbg like that, that perhaps I needed to just travel awhile and take it easy. Maybe she's right. Though I think if I was a bit rigid it was probably because we were talking about work, which always gets my back up. Or maybe I always look tense. If so it is pure illusion. Nowadays, for most of the time, I feel oceans of calm inhabiting me, since I left my settled life behind.

The bus from Pergamon to Selcuk (Ephesus) was excellent as usual. Turkish buses always have ample leg room, by which I mean ample enough even when the person in front of you reclines and when you're 6 foot 4, like me. Water and coffee is served and the airconditioning is both always there and powerful. Sometimes you can even turn off the sound that plays on the buses that show videos.

It seems this entry must draw to a close, so I'll write more on Ephesus, Pammukale, Eigirdir and Konya tomorrow. Such are the trials of time I can't stop the present moving on, even though I haven't swept up all of my past. This offends my linear instincts of chronological logic but perhaps doesn't trouble my reader.

Now I must wander. Well, not must, but you know what I mean.

Istanbul to Troy

Apologies that the formatting below is inconsistent. Blame blogger not me, or if me then only my failure to grasp blogger's occult secrets.

I didn't stay more than a day in Istanbul (which means 'The City') because I spent a week there in April 2004. Not much had changed, except for the bar area of the hostel I used to stay in. It was nice to remember the same young assitant from that time, who's now opened his own hostel across the street. The hostel's belly dancer had certainly improved. Over my expensive Effes beer (so long, Bulgaria) I incredibly met my sixth French person in two days, after having met none for over a month. He told me he hadn't heard of the 'Bay of Biscay' (they don't call it that apparently) and that although the French do call this country 'Turkei' (spelling?), that word to them has no alternative meaning, indicative for example of the Christmas feasting of Crusaders. He also told me, in a broad chuckle, that I am in no way unique for asking him what he thinks of Sarkozy, his new President- a chuckle that reassured me I wasn't being too dull in asking.

I only went to that hostel for a nostalgic drink. I actually stayed in the highly, justifiably recommended 'Bauhaus', just round the corner, a curious feature of which was a never before seen toilet seat covered with revolving protective paper. Hmmmm, I'd known that crouching asiatics argue with some justification that their way is healthier and more hygienic. Yet in toilet seats, as in much else it seems, Turks want to look west (in western Turkey anyway). Presumably this curious device is invented to ease the transition for horrified crouchers.

NB: Below, for conceptual ease, I shall refer to Turkey as NOT being in Europe. Clearly the Thracian section is, it seeks EU membership, and since Ataturk it has looked west longingly in many respects. Nevertheless, historically, culturally and religiously it is not European and it ain't for nothing either that one speaks of Asia Minor.

Bizarre and/or funny things that have happened to me so far, in the land of the Crescent hugged star:

1. Having my hair shaved in Istanbul. The barber coiled a thin scarf round my neck, to which was attached the cape one gets (even in Europe). An ingenious trick which, as well as dashing in appearance, prevented all stubborn hair fragments from rustling my neck. His later taking out a cigarrete burner and flashing flame at my ear drums was a bit more alarming, for a split second anyway, until I realised the bold genius of the ear fluff removing gesture. Has anyone received this treatment in Europe. Is it only me who thinks it unusual, and inspired?
2. Laughing at the sign in the Bauhaus hostel toilet: "For God's sake switch off the light."
3. Seeing again (after 3 years) the sign on the carpet shop beside Hagia Sophia declaring "Sorry, we're open". And yet I was sure it used to be yellow, not white. Sure enough, as I suspected, and the laughing owner confirmed, they decided to keep it after realising their mistake, presumably because so many tourist found it funny.
4. Using coins smaller than their smallest coin to gain access to the efficient tram system, which wasn't here in 2004.
5. Confusing a second hand bookseller when I noted that the Lonely Planet Turkey guide I wanted to buy didn't have a code, signalling how much it would cost according to their syetm. "No code" I said, pointing at the absence of a code sticker. He didn't understand. After I repeated my words 'No code' he pretended to be in a boxing match with me saying, confusedly, 'Knock out?', 'Knock out?' while shadow boxing and throwing his head back and down.

The Turks certainly have a lively sense of humour. That said, they are quick to anger and easily offended. Or maybe eveyone is quick to take offence but not everyone will show it as readily. The Slavs for example. Maybe they find my tendency to quick- tempered exasperation, when it surfaces, just as rude as the Turks do, but only react to it internally such as to not make me aware of their feelings. Having lived in Slovakia for 6 years, I can believe this; and the greater volatility of humanitas on this side of the Bulgar border makes me believe it equally of Bulgarians too. I have often thought that Slavs are very unpretentious people, in that they don't tend to spin tales about themselves, don't wear elaborate persona masks, and will not hide that they are bored or unhappy, even when greater profits would flow from such a hiding (for example in the Bar or Catering industries). But maybe their general aura of reserve and passivity-in public (compared to Asians and Meditterranean peoples anyway) conceals them in another sense not covered by pretentiousness. So maybe that's why I have sometimes had the lingering suspicion that I don't know where I stand with them- i.e if they like me or think me a prat. That sense of not knowing, born of a reserve which one might readily commend as politeness, can sometimes feel unnerving.

The Turks in any case seem far less hidden. This in-my-face ebullience I have found pleasantly refreshing. Certainly, they seem far more confident and assertive. That whole burly-whirly, who-needs-private-space, freneticism perfected to an art in Egypt and India, generally associated in my eyes with Middle and Central Asia, makes a defiant stand here, and is as visible as it is absent across the border. It makes me aware that I've crossed a cultural fault line far more significant than the one between Northern and Southern Europe, for example.

Twice I have been offered lifts on guy's motorbikes without asking for a lift when trudging along a road. Twice I have been offered directions to where I wanted to go, again without asking. While it's true, especially in the tourist hyper-zones, that a great deal of this friendliness is mere preable to carpet and trinket hawking, I still get the impression that a lot is mixed with geniune warmth. And of course I can symapthise with their having to endure wave after wave of processed tourist, whom quite possibly they have grown to disrespect for their ability to be ripped off?

After Istanbul I went corporate and took a package tour to Gallipoli, shock horror. I'm glad I did as the various ANZAC monuments are stuck out miles apart on different ridges and hills. My British patriotism was bruised far more, actually, by the fact that so little mention is made by the tourist industry of the British and French operations to the the south of the ANZAC ones, than it was by the occasional dig one gets from the literature about British incompetence and perfidy sacrificing the lives of noble Kiwis and Ozzies, much of which I can believe. I was struck by the sense of Turkish-ANZAC friendship in the shared memory of the atrocities, and reminded of what hadn't been as apparent before - that it was a major conflict for the Turks too, a defining moment in the emergence of their post Ottoman history, and the first time they'd had to defend their homeland.

Combined with the Gallipoli tour was a stroll around Troy, or what's left of it anyway, which isn't much. To be frank, not that impressive, though Mustafa the chirpy tour guide and author of the guide book he waved at us, was great. Alas, I did climb inside the gimmicky wooden horse and have my photo taken peering out of the windows in its side, just like all the Korean tourists.

I would write more but, as it happens, I've had enough for now and must stroll some more around Selcuk, near Ephesus, to where I've come after Pergamon.

Turkey means 'strong thing' in Turkish. The English Ornothological echo is pure co-incidence

Have moved on from Istanbul, through Gallipoli and Troy to end up in Bergama, the site of ancient Pergamum. That's allI have to say for now, but more shall follow when I can find a better moment (and key board).

Certainly things are very different from Bulgaria, though not as different from Slovakia.

It may, yes, be yet another kebab tonight, stomach be warned.

Varna - The Place of Decision

When I set out travelling in Greece and the Balkans I'd expected to keep going for three weeks, no longer. I'd thought I might wind my way to Varna (to meet a student of mine who's been holidaying here) but I wasn't sure. I'd entertained notions of perhaps jetting off to America or Canada mid July to see friends and have a look around, but nothing was fixed. I also thought I might be driving around the Baltic states with a Slovak friend in the second half of July. My mind was in such a desperate fury to rid itself of the vice of my life as a Bratislavan teacher of her Majesty's babbledegook, that to be honest to be free in any way at all was all that mattered; to have something as vulgar and pressuring as a fixed plan seemed, well, rude .

This is actually the first time I've travelled quite like this, with no certain idea of which country I might go to next, or for how long I'll keep going. I'm even toying with the idea -as lightly as a one can toy mind you, as If I toy with a baby chuck's feather- that I'll forget about work and money altogether and keep going for a year or more, as the Ozzies and Kiwis do. For them, setting off on long-haul, rambling, jaunts around the Old World have become something of a rite of passage, so it seems. Who knows how they afford it. One isn't supposed to ask and one doesn't, which is probably just as well. Anyway, I'm sure it does them a world of good. It's always been something I've thought vaguely of doing, but so far the longest I've been on the road is 53 days, in Australia in 1991- which is a paltry acheievement in comparison.

No prizes for guessing the ONLY thing that prevents me from keeping going for at least three years is that most wonderful of human inventions, that veritable benison and blessing, that sacrament of human progress, enlightenment and advancement -Money, or as it's otherwise known, the effluent of Lord Mammon's ass.

Presumably there are endless reams of super advanced civilisations spread across the milkiness of space who join us in regulating their affairs through the circulation of lumps of tasteless, odourless, fake metal, of slices of paper too small to do anything practical with, and through the movement backwards and forward between computers of abstract, digital sums of what amounts to absolutely nothing. I mean it's inconceivable, isnt it, that anyone might actually not be as insanely brilliant as that?

Alas, if I were to travel as I'd like - something which is possible- I'd lose alot of the meagre effluent I've managed to accumulate as a security against some unforeseen eventuality I might face in the future in which this shit will become really vital. So, even though I've got it, I shouldn't be spending it. Well, not that is, if I'm to avoid repeating the folly of my youth, in which I thoughtlessly lost an awful lot of inherited shit through a failure of retention.

By the way, so much as I hate money, I can't help noticing that there are some of my fellow homo sapiens who are veritably drowning in the stuff. So, if anyone out there has got too much and wants to do something original with it, you are warmly welcome to help me travel the world awhile. Naturally, I would be incredibly grateful and will look upon you as my saviour and liberator from the shackles of the beast system that is Babylon (or what you will). It really would make my day, and year, or rather years. Why, I could even wear your name on my T-shirt or something. Hmmmm...notice that I am not asking, far less begging for money. That would be absurdly embarrassing. And please, no talk of loans. I just thought it might make a change from buying yet another yacht, or another car, or another whatever it is rich people spend the money they don't need on. After all, Im alive, those things are dead.

Oh well. As it is I did end up in Varna, where I am now. I never could meet up with my friend, which was a shame but I'm glad I came, even though it really is a 'tourist trap' as the cliche goes. Today was a moment of decision. I had to decide whether to go north or south - to Moldova and Ukraine or to Turkey and from there, perhaps, to Georgia and Armenia. Alas, the boat once a week from Varna to Georgia can't be found (and its a 4 day journey anyway!) and I'll have to wait until Saturday to get to Moldova, which I can't quite face. So, tomorrow to Asia Minor, or should I say the border city of the continents -Istanbul, or Constantinople as the Patriachate still likes, defiantly and somewhat charmingly, to refer to it.

Meanwhile, I shall explore Varna's nightlife and watch the Slavs at what I suspect will be some fairly predictable, loud, thumping manner of mindless play, interspersed with visions of enrapturing, disappearing female beauty..the kind of beauty that used to make me sad - before I grew up, or is it just before I was worn out.

I've reached Varna, the Black Sea

Yesterday in a café in Arbanasi, I wrote the following words. I apologise in advance for their 'craziness' and/or for being mistaken, if I am. I am aware that this deep and ponderous self is only of my dimensions. Indeed that I have many 'selves', none of which are fake or pretentious, none of which, to me at least, seem mutually incompatible. This means, however, that when I express myself, such as I do below, in a way particularly suggestive of only one of my selves I feel somehow embarrassed by a suggestion of self-misrepresentation. Yes, this is me, but I am more than this, so to consider this to be me, and only this me, is to be led astray.

In the world to come

There will be no

Money or Trade
Marriage or exclusive love
Egoism or Idolatry

However, People on the material plane will be able to have whatever they want and in whatever quantity they desire (so long as it is available).

Also:

People will not have to work. People will only work if they want to, and if they know what they want to do. People will only ever do work which they want to do.

People's privacy will be an certain prerogative and possession. That said, privacy will be conditioned by the realities of life lived according to the authentic, not the egoistic "I". That authenticity on the one hand will lead those possessing it (i.e everyone) to want to sensitively respect the lives of others; so delicate hands respecting the other will be seen. On the other hand, people will not want to isolate or conceal themselves, since the public domain will itself be infused and animated, suffused and conditioned, by that very same mode of authentic being which inhabits, albeit in a different style, the individual soul. Recognition felt, then, between an individual's inner life and the outer, public life of society will lead people both not to feel the need, in the extreme way we see today, to conceal and demarcate private from public, and to want to share and reveal their inner desires, feelings and thoughts to the greater vitality and richness of that public space. So a different arrangement or 'contract' between public and private will be established, based always on consent and desire, regulated by the inner voice of an authentic, not egoistic, self, attuned to the holistic intelligence of God.

Clearly the above is very utopian, very idealistic. So what? After I finished my after dinner speech at the Athenaeum Club in London to the Society of the Knights of the Round table in 1988, I was told by an elderly gentleman never to lose my idealism. I wonder if the above pleases him.

A Communist, moi? If you want, I don't care for labels. Communitarian certainly. What's in a word? Communist could do as well. But of course since the divine is central, indeed foundational, to my vision, clearly I am world's away from the disastrous experiments in communism of the recent past. Reminiscent more, no doubt, of the social experiments of England during the 17^th century Interregnum, but still rather different from them too.

The 'Communitarianism' I speak of belongs to the future, not the present. And it will follow, not precede, a transformation of human consciousness which will itself attend and follow, as we can already see it doing, the collapse of the traditional structures of human society, through a dynamic, not of revolution but implosion.

Marx's great error was to see matter as more fundamental than consciousness; and related to this to suppose that human nature would be changed by a radical reordering of social and economic relations. Because of this error, Marxism was doomed to failure from the start.

He was right however to see human nature as malleable and mutable, unfinished and capable of great things, but wrong to see it as something only needing liberation from an unjust system in order to achieve greatness, justice and freedom. His critique of the world, then, was not deep enough, since he failed to deplore the human subject for what it is in-itself, be that ruler landlord or peasant, merchant or worker.

First the inner life of mankind must change, only then will his outer life be transformed, and the phoenix of a genuinely just world arise from the ashes of a redundant and surpassed world.

It should be a gentle and gracious process, the old making way for the new gradually, not by violent revolution, but when it has been observed that the old has been transcended, that new wine requires new wineskins.

Veliko Tarnovo

Internet access is patchy in Bulgaria and when you find it prepare to be suddenly cut off. Two hotels I've come across don't offer it but have been glad to offer me the computer in the manager's office, which I thought as pleasant as it was unusual.

The chronological, factual day by day account of my derring-doing, such as is in my last post, I'm sure must be dull- in form if not in content- so I'll put all detail of my travellings into that one entry, so you may have to refer back (if interest calls). Naturally, I keep these records as much, if not more, for myself as for other sublunar souls. I say that not to sound selfish but to fortify myself with a reason to carry on if nobody else cares to read.

I've been trying to work out why my left leg hurts in two places. In my calf muscle in a precise way it never has before, but also in the heel of my left foot, especially when I stand up in the morning after waking. Sometimes it leaves me limping. It tends to get much better after about 30 minutes or so but if I focus I can sense it's there all the time I walk. I remember I had this pain 4 years or so ago when I was going out with Maria. She got me one of those stone, rubby things you use to despatch dead skin from neglected feet, and I definitely used it. Was this then why the ailment got better? Will using one of these (pumice stones??) work the trick again?

Or maybe it's got to do with the fact I'm a bit overweight, as I was then, and have been less so since, until recently? Maybe I have too much pressure pushing down on my overburderned footsies (but why then the left and not the right also? Because my right leg is longer than my left? Hmmmmm intriguing mysteries, Sherlock.)

Or maybe its something to do with blood presure or flow in the inner pathways of my left lower tentacle.

Today was noticeable for three losses, which have combined to make me the poorer, and presumably somebody else the richer. In order of importance, from least to greatest: both of my pairs of headphones (I count both as one item), my copy of "Lost Christianity", which I was enjoying, despite its sogginess, and my Creative MP3 player. I have no idea how I lost these but I sincerely doubt foul play was involved. Its just a habit I've always had - not retaining my satellites, allowing them to slip free and defy gravity. Presumably this has something to do with attention, or the lack of it; not being present, not being focused, not having ones brains nailed to the floor. Or is it that I'm not mechanical enough in my movements, not regulated or routinised in the way some are who never lose anything except at the hand of invaders?

My mind teases me that its not too late for my MP3 player, that somehow it's going to turn up the next time I scour my back pack and open every flap and portal; or else that a mysterious email will somehow reach me, summoning me back to reclaim my property from wherever it was I abandoned it. But this is pancake thinking, isn't it? Possibly, if I could somehow remember the name of the Hotel in Koprivshitsa I stayed in last night I could contact them and see what flies, but I think its time, really, to bury the memory, and console myself with the productive rumination that, despite the damn inconvenience of its loss, it really was a crummy piece of mechanical excrement that never stored enough and too often just didnt work at all (for example throughout my entire trip to Japan last year). No hard feelings, MP3 player, I hope. I knows its your creator's fault.

Of course, if this was 3 years ago, in a more solid, reliable, less Gizmatic world, and had my case of CD's with me, all I'd do is buy another CD Walkman. But now, I have no CDs here and what use is an MP3 player to me If you can download songs in shops somewhere in the world, I'm pretty sure you can't in Bulgaria.

Ohrid until today

Saturday July 21st Walk alone around Pirin national park, near Bansko, Bulgaria. Alone with wild horses. Climb up mountian through the river, over rocks. Listen to Dido on my descent. Walk down hill but catch a lift with 2 Brits, here unsurprisingly to buy property. Weird to see a ski slope with no snow. Swim in hotel's pool and chat to friendly son of the owner of the room I'm staying in, who gave me a card to show to my friend advertising "Cosiness in the heart of Bansko". Read from 'Lost Christianity' by Jacob Needleman, after a break of 19 years. A vivid, poignant book. My DvD of Kafka's 'The Trial' is unfuctionally scratched.
Friday July 20th Take bus and then taxi and then bus from Rila monastery to Bansko. Overwhelmed by number of Real estate offices, many of them British. Meet a Bavarian expat, the first foreigner to live in Bansko, or so he says. Read much of 'Bloodline of the Holy Grail' by Laurence Gardner, an academic yet partial and unsterile look at the 'Jesus had kids' question. My thinking: So these descendants of Jesus and his brother James: What is it makes them so special even if they do exist...is it something in the blood? Obviously I think I'd like to be such a descendent, and have a secret order looking after me, but I get the impression they're all aristos linked to dispossessed royal houses. Overall, I approve of Gardener's analysis of the forces of ecclesiastical/political oppression over the years. And interesting how he argues that people's rights were undermined not strengthened by Parliament's triumph over the King in the later 17th century. I like what he says regarding a 'Grail code'; that rulers' prime responsibilty is to their duties, not to themselves; to serve, not to be master.
Thursday July 19th Stay the night in Rila Monastery, the holiest place in Bulgaria, centre of Bulgarian cultural preservation during Ottoman rule. Very beautiful building. Meet a friendly, uncamp, gay ex music producer from London, who persuades me to drink a raika (strong spirit). We almost don't return to monastery in time for curfew.
Wednesday July 18th Feeling better than yesterday. See remaining churches and sights, but fail to get up Vitosha mountain. See Transformers at cinema...witness what I'd missed out on as a kid. Chat about Armenian history with gigi, the hostel landlord.
Tuesday July 17th Madly hot in Sofia..and dry and tiring. Watch 28 weeks later at the cinema. Need to, but cant find a swimming pool.

Monday July 16th Chat with very aimiable, informative Greek guy on bus from Pristina to Skopje about Greek politics and UN and other humanitarian work. Idle aroud waiting for the bus to Sofia, and stay in a hostel of a very friendly, half Armenian Bulgarian.

Sunday July 15th Long wait in Mitrovica for the bus to Nis that I get thrown off. Meet UN police men/women and students from Croatia and The Netherlands. Experience the loud defiant vibrancy of the Albanian quarter on the Serb side of the river.

Saturday July 14th See barricaded KFOR protected Serb churches in the heart of Prizren. Meet jolly Albanian on bus to Mitrovica and explore Serb side of the river.

Friday July 13th Crawl out of bed to meet Mark, expecting him to be late, which he isnt. Take boat from ex Macedonian soldier, who'd worked with the British Army in Kosovo, around the Penninsula to a tourist-free beach. Are harassed by the Manger of a beach-siding restaurant when i audaciously drink from my own water bottle as I order a beer and some food. Formerly timid waiter grows disdainful in his presence, declaring, as if this was supposed to impress me,'he's the owner'. Decide in Pristina to immediately continue onto Prizren.

(to be continued)

Sofia

Composing on a Mac is weird and awkward. The Mouse is bizarre. Moreover, Im sitting on a stool with the keyboard on my lap, far far from the screen.

Incredibly hot today. Headaches, sore legs and frustration. I can't get my mind round Sofia, city of holy Wisdom, can't grasp or discern a clear picture of it. Maybe I need more time. Very long streets, lots of shops, not enough squares, not enough open spaces.

Lovely yoghurt type drink that I hope will calm my stomach. It looks like milk and you can buy it in pubs.

Wikipedia and Google do not clearly point to any real historical figure called St.Sophia (or Sofia), the Sofia which so many churches in the Orthodox World and this city are named after. So one is inclined, as I am tempted, to conclude that the Sofia referred to is in fact the celestial enity equated with "Wisdom'', or "The Wisdom of Jesus Christ". While in the non-heretical conventional Christian World there's not much to this "Sofia", beyond whetever it is you might think of as Wisdom, when you look at Sofia from a Gnostic viewpoint a true can of worms open up. This Sofia to them is a female manifestation of the Godhead and consort to the celestial Christ, who in a fit of Christ-shunning independence created a flawed, lesser being called laldabaoth, whom she then hid in a cloud. Poor laldabaoth you might think. Well, Indeed. Anyway, according to the gnostics, this cloud dwelling lesser being is none other than the creator of the physical universe, and so more than a little important- at least from our perspective- despite his flaws and limitations.

The appeal of this gnostic myth is that it echoes what Morpheus tells us in the film, The Matrix, that there is 'something wrong with the world'. Just as in the film, so also in reality, what is wrong is that this 'world' is the invention of a malicious and manipulative, or at least ignorant and deluded, agency, and that it is not our true home.

A pleasing corollary to this, one that defends the dignity of we humans (generally a good thing I find), is that we cannot be to blame for the problems of the world in the way mainstream Christian theologians tediously insist we are with their fruity doctrine of Original Sin etc etc etc.

Instead to blame is this cloud dweller, the blind God, the child of Chaos, laldabaoth, and behind him, ultimately (for presumably he didn't ask to be born and to be concealed in a cloud) Sofia herself, the consort, or dare we say lover of Christ (forget the Magdalene, this romance with Sofia was bred from eternity).

And since Sofia is divine this 'blasphemously' puts the blame on the true God him/herself, which of course is something the pomposity of mainstrean Christianity can never stomach. And why should that be we might ask? Because to them God is ultimately all about power, and is the ultimate justification of their own all-too-human power. As below, so above. Power loving priests cannot continue in power if they accept blame or criticism, and so it must be the same, indeed even more so, for the God that upholds and defends their position.

But if God is not about power at all, but instead about love, then God wouldn't mind being exposed to criticism or being vulnerable, and accepting that things might have gone wrong, or even fundamentally be wrong, with the very structure of the universe itself.

But spiritual people will never be comfortable with this idea as long as they cling to their pomposity, I fear.

Back In Skopje

No, things did not go according to plan. I won't be catching the Balkan Express, romantically sat over a Turkish coffee as its chuffs towards Istanbul. Instead I wait for a bus in Skopje, a town I was determined not to have to return to. Why? Because I was thrown off my bus to Nis at the Serbian border by a plain clothed, embarrassed, cigarette offering, but finally apologetic policeman.

I didn't understand why I was thrown off. From what I gathered from his shrugs and amiable sighs, neither did he. But he was certain I couldn't go on, that if I wanted to enter non-Kosovan Serbia I had to return to Macedonia and enter again from Presovo, a different border point. This confused me, since I'd thought Kosovo was still technically Serbian. I hadn't expected a Serb would want to doubt that, by acting all histrionic about pompous things like border crossings and passport stamps. Still, this is what he did. I had to return to the point at which I entered Kosovo from Macedonia. I had to leave one part of Serbia in order to enter another part. And all this in a country that doesn't think its divided. Put that in your bong and smoke it.

Now I see why it is, and it makes more sense. The stamp I got when I entered Kosovo (Serbia?) was only a United Nations stamp, not a Serbian stamp. Therefore, by trying to leave UN administered Kosovo I was trying to travel around Serbia without a Serbian entry stamp. Since Serbia does not recognise the UN administration of its Holy Land, the border between Kosovo and Serbia isn't a Serbian border or entry point and therefore it can't give me an entry stamp. But I needed a stamp so, hey presto, here I am in Skopje planning, perhaps unsurprisingly, to give Serbia a miss for now. Actually, from a Serb point of view I grant, the logic is impregnable. Its just that from mine it was a pain in the ass.

Ultimately, I see that it was probably good he turned me around when he did. Otherwise who knows what might have happened when I tried to leave Serbia at the Bulgarian border without a Serbian entry stamp. Maybe I could have just said I parachuted in and left it at that. Ah, but then he'd have seen my UN Kosovan entry stamp and my dastardly 'greater' Serbian roamings would have been revealed for the foul deeds they were. Still, at least I travelled from Southern to Northern Kosovo, which was basically my intention.

Presently I'm thinking of a windy route across Bulgaria to the black sea and then of catching a boat to Odessa. From there I might enter Moldova and see Kiev and Lviv before crossing back into Slovakia.

Mitrovica, Kosovo

Thanks to misinformation I linger on the border between Serb and Albanian Kosovo longer than I'd planned. My bus to Nis (in Serbia proper) leaves in one and a half hours.

On the bus from Pristina an Albanian joked that I was secret service (CIA in his view). Between amiable laughs he warned me not to cross to the Serb side of the river Iba. He seemed intrigued that I should be in Mitrovica. Maybe there are some repressed machismo urges in me seeking expression but I can't help feeling vaguely attracted to danger zones like this. Only, I really don't find it intimidating or unwelcoming at all. Of course, the Serbs are somewhat grumpy and dour in contrast to the Albanians, but generally one expects such reserve from Slavs.

According to an English UN ex-Policewoman I chatted to, I should buy myself a hat to avoid sunstroke. She also told me there are still sometimes isolated incidents of violence involving grenades, etc, but besides such media-unworthy events there's been peace here for three years since the riots in 2004. That said, tensions simmer beneath the surface. Kosovans yearn to declare an independence they consider all but in the bag, yet are restrained from doing so by an America that first wants the EU to replace the UN as chief Kosovan guarantor. The big Russian bear, which says it will support nothing that Serbia opposes (like giving up Kosovo) is also a factor. To the Americans, Kosovo, next to missile shields and Iraq/Iran, is not a priority, over which its not worth upsetting the honey monster. Well, not for now at least.

I, an Englishman, remain as puzzled as the next Albanian as to why the Serbs care as they do about Kosovo. After all, it was here they lost to the Turks in 1389 in a battle they continue to celebrate in an expression of patriotism. Isn't that like the Anglo-Saxons celebrating the Battle of Hastings? Beyond this, 90% of the population is Albanian. Have I missed something? Enlightenment requested. Obviously I now have to suppose some will think me anti-Serb or whatever. Such is the world I have grown all too acquainted with.

I enjoyed looking at the battery powered generators the Albanians use to keep the lights on. And the fact that coffee costs 50 Euro cents. It's definitely the cheapest area I've been to so far in the Balkans..and possibly the friendliest and most laid back (threat of bloodshed not withstanding), which as usual doesn't surprise me.

Not sure I've ever been to a place where you pay with one currency in one cafe (Euros in Albanian areas) and another currency just up the street (in Serb Dinars). Generally speaking the river Iba divides the communities, but there's still an Albania area on the Serb side (called the Bosnian quarter), and Serb and Albanian flags fly around the corner from each other. Despite the offical tension it was interesting to read that the communities do co-operate, for example on a recent river cleaning project. Politicians avoid mentioning such matters since polarisation and fearmongering court votes, as we know.

Two hours after being told by a German UN police officer that I was the first tourist he'd seen in eight years, I surreally ran into and drank coffee with three young students studying cultural redevelopment here at the local University. They seemed as relaxed and blase about life as they might back home.

If all goes according to plan I will not be sleeping in Nis bus station tonight when I arrive at 11pm after my 6 hour bus journey, but will find a hotel (preferably not 5 star). The pretty Serb Girl who bought my coffee reassured me I'd be ok.

Plans are to get the "Balkan Express" tomorrow to Sofia, my first train yet. Hopefully it will have a buffet car.

Prizren, Kosovo

Greetings from Kosovo, a place which is understandably, and agreeably, free of tourists. Sometimes I like to flow with the backpacker circuit, but not always.

The keys on this typewriter are laughably eccentric and the speed of my connection is pitiful but with a Peja beer to accompany me, a meal somewhere to look forward to and a room in which to watch my recently purchased pirated copy of '28 weeks later' chanting to me, all is well with my world. You may wonder how I will watch the film? On my portable DVD player, that's how..the ultimate travel accessory, and at a mere 10 euros second hand only deceptively plush.

Today in Skopje, the Macedonian capital, where I spent one night after Ohrid, I walked in on a Mosque during the weekly friday prayers. My exotic presence was noticeably reflected upon but always aimably I felt (ok except for one staring guy). They wanted to engage me in conversation in German, which taxed my O level memory. Only men and boys were present. I liked the ways they just hung around the drinking fountains, languidly paying attention to their religious responsibilities when they felt the calling, casually removing their shoes where appropriate. Otherwise just chatting and idling around.

As it was in Bosnia 4 years ago, it remains a surprise to see Muslim Caucasians. One just doesn't expect it (does one?...or do 'you', if we must be modern). Whilst one accurately might not expect Muslims to be Arabic (most are Asian), one cannot help expecting them not to be white, as many of them here are.

I suppose in this climate some might think that last paragraph either racist or Islamophobic. That would be unbelievable if it weren't believable.

I may not be going to Saudi Arabia after all....visa worries and troubles. But we shall see.

Ohrid

Currently I enjoy Ohrid, Macedonia. It's delightful here, even with too many tourists. I have yet to fully explore. The young English, Welsh and Dutch ladies staying in this hostel are delightful looking, and charming to talk to. This was the case even before I dragged on some wacky baccy that an English youth offered me and became even more so subsequently. As is usual in such circumstances I then ate far more than I needed to, but had a feast of a time strolling languidly and wide eyed around the nightlife of Ohrid the unhorrid.

By the way, after Tirana I took a bus to Korca with an American who, no joke, had changed her name from Susan to Artemis. We almost went through with a booking to stay in a grubby, possibly flea ridden, historically protected builing for a stunning 2.5 euros a night. We had planned to escape as much as possible from our disconcerting room by eating, drinking and watching Mr Bean's holiday at the local cinema (delapidated but equipped with a functional-looking popcorn machine). But then we said "f**ck it" or something like that, booked into a nearby proper hotel for 10 euros each, skipped Mr Bean, and skillfully lied to the garrulous owner of the fleapit as to why we were withdrawing our bags from his beautiful dive before the hours of darkness. We must flee to the mountains tonight, we explained, where beauty untold lies, as he himself agreed (In Vospokoja). When he followed us after he saw us clearly walking past the taxi rank that should have taken us there, we reassured him it was to get water. We then sort of hoped he'd lose interest but were not sure he would. But TV, a real live hot shower and AC soon captured our attention.

Actually, to be a nerd, it may not actually have been the owner, but he was certainly associated with the hostel.

Anyway, I have not yet got to the bottom of the intriguing Alexander The Great question, regarding whether his memory should belong to this land or to Greece. Both countries claim to own him, and I can see both countries having the right. In Macedonia's favour Ancient Macedonia was more outside than inside the borders of modern Greece, whilst on the other hand the culture of ancient Macedonia was far more Greek than Slav (indeeed it wasn't slav at all). But given that Alexander III (as the Maccy's call him) invaded and crushed the Greek city states one might wonder why the Greeks want to be associated with him at all? Ah yes, because he then imperiously took Greek culture and values across the known world. Silly me, nothing like a bit of basking in imperial adventurism to reassure you to subjection

Tirana

Currently I'm in Tirana, Albania and am not sure how much time I'll have on this computer. All has gone well. Barring sunburn at Corinth and the loss of my shorts at Delphi that is. I have been further enraptured by the stern, firm, ever so graceful beauty of the Ancient Greeks.

Geoffrey wants the computer so I must fly. Another day trip in Albania and then onto Montenegro. After that I am not sure..any ideas?

Day Two - Athens

One day last week was the hottest day in Athens for 110 years. Something like 40 Centigrade. This is child's play next to the regular grillings of 45 + I'm set to endure in Saudi Arabia, but then you expect that kind of madness there.

A guy in my dorm told me you shouldn't talk about Religion and Politics because they're controversial (this I'd heard before). But then he added you shouldn't talk about the weather either because it's boring. So that's me off to a good start. I'd always thought talk about the weather was what one did to avoid a silence that would be even worse. I'd never heard weather-talk trashed like that before, without qualification. Oh well.

Hadrian's Arch exerted a vivid hold over me as I ambled around it, imagining I was a Greek dignitary, or Caesar. I recommend such imaginings in Athens and Rome. How else can you enter into the spirit of such places? I made various monumentalist arm raising gestures which made me feel sublime and lofty within, and which had an unknown effect on the strangers that surrounded me.

I have pondered the glory that was Greece and what it must have meant. Were these people really less degenerate than we are, as Nietzsche for one supposed? If so why, and how precisely?

Meditating on the generous capaciousness of the polythesitic set up, I've been sensing how this must have been allied to a less rigidly focused, tunnel visioned mindset than we see in MonoGodland. Yet it's also clear that the Greek Gods of Olympus are not creator Gods. They are not different from, nor do they exist prior to, the Universe. They are created and fallible beings like us, different only in their degree of power and the not so small matter that they refuse to die. Identitfied anthropormophically with particular human qualities and emotions, their actions, passions and absurd caprices make sense of, giving reason and coherence to, human collective and subjective experiences. In this way, it seems, their function is to explain and elucidate this normal everyday human reality that we seem perpetually to undergo. Such a role can not be imagined for the God of Abraham, who is concerned to challenge and change human reality by exhorting it to become something different by pressurising his worshippers, by both promise and threats, to act differently in general, both towards him and one another. Here, history is not a circle, the eternal recurrence of the same that wants mythopoetic explanation; history instead is an arrow, with a beginning, a middle and an end, a process we're stuck in the middle of, a destiny awaiting resolution, an expedition not yet home.

How is this difference reflected in the different degrees of alienation or intimacy humans must feel towards the 'Olympian Twelve', and the Abrahamic Creator God of the currently reigning Monotheistic Religions? In one sense it must be much easier to love, or at least relate to, a wisdom showering Athena, or a pregnancy protecting Artemis, a shamelessly warmongering Ares, or a musically prophesying Apollo, a wine pouring Dionysus or a draconian womanising Zeus, than to relate to or love an imageless, non-human all powerful God, who will nonetheless not let his absence of a personality get in the way of his imposing all kinds of laws and duties and prohibitions upon us that affect and penetrate the most personal dimensions of our lives. On the other hand, the Olympian Twelve, so long as we give them the appropriate devotion and sacrifice, don't much care for us individually -unless they happen to find us personally attractive. Whilst some might find that lack of interest liberating and reassuring, others might feel it callous and insensitive. At the end of the day the Olympian Twelve, like us, are the abject prisoners of fate. They therefore can give us less to hope for than can the Abrahamic God, that is if you believe in him and, more to the point, if you believe you are on his right side.

It seems that the difference might boil down to a question of identification and hope. Whilst the Olympian Twelve are easy to relate to and love, in that they share in and somehow glorify the human experience, they can offer little in the way of personal salvation or deliverance or enlightenment, in terms, that is, of a transportation to a whole other world or dimension of reality. Such a deliverance, such a salvation, however, seems central to the Abrahamic path, but when we think about what exactly this God is we are dealing with, our minds and even our hearts might draw a blank -and this quite simply is because this God is not human (a fact you might consider a good, a bad or a neutral quality about him).

Now of course you might want to argue that this Abrahamic God becoming a real, live, walking human in the person of Jesus Christ changes things somewhat. But that, as it is said, is a whole other chestnut- ballgame- scenario. At least today anyway.

I must go, people wait for the computers.

Underslept in Athens

Greetings from Athens from a very tired man. It's 7.25am. I arrived in the middle of the night 4 hours ago, then sat drinking a McDonalds coffee in Syntagma square, surrounded by dogs, since there was nothing else to do, before discovering a cockroach in the shower of my hostel, whose internet facilities I am now using. I would far rather go to sleep for a few hours but there are no beds (so the attendant says) until 10am. More to the point, there are no armchairs or couches which strikes me as uncivilised and simply bizarre, as I've never encountered such an absence in an hostel before.

Highlight of the trip so far: Reading, hovering over my McDonalds coffee, about the Twelve Olympian Gods from a book I wisely bought from a kiosk upon arriving. I think at last I can memorise their names. I trust brushing up on my mythology (e.g Hephaistos' chaining of his mother to a chair) will enhance my experience of Athens.

It is nice that my holiday has started at last, after what seemed like an endless process of tying up my recent uninspiring existence in Bratislava. As usual I underestimated the time it would take for me to pack, and the sheer quanitity of stuff a hoarder such as I had accumulated. And that despite the fact that I must have sold, or indefinitely lent or given away, about 150 books in the past 6 months.

So, Shall I go to the Peloponnese, or to the mainland before ploughing north to Albania, where I expect to be by the 6th.

Any readers of this blog happen to live, or be, in Athens right now? Fat chance.

I am not what I am

As an adolescent one is allowed to experience crises of identity and not know who one is, or what one wants. By ones mid thirties one is not supposed to feel this way. By that time existential quandaries should have been resolved and sorted. By that time, naval excavated, wild seeds sown, restive eggs scattered, a secure career direction, a settled partner, children, and a mortgage, should be the new reality of your life.

If there’s one criticism which ‘gets my back up’, as it is cryptically said, it is that I’m immature (possibly because it’s true). It’s not without defensiveness or anxiety therefore that I admit, as a 35 year old, that I’m no closer to knowing ‘who’ I am or ‘what’ I want. I resent the idea that the reason I’m no closer to ‘self-actualisation’ than ever is because I’m a retard, even if it’s true. I hope that is understood.

Everyday people are asked what they 'do’. Usually people are not particularly interested in the answer, but asking the question is a conventional way of filling the silence and breaking the ice, and one is supposed to reply. If you answer that you eat nachos, scratch your head, breathe, walk the earth, dress and undress, think, sleep, look at things, listen to birds, get sad, get happy, drink coffee, slurp beer, walk into lamp posts, etc, you may have answered accurately. But you have not answered conventionally, which is why you will be thought strange. To give a proper answer you’re supposed to understand that the question is code for a specific enquiry: How do you fit into the human patterning of society, or the system, which more often than not means, (unless other people have given you money, or you have won money) what do you do for money?

The assumption is that you belong to this system, and that what you are equals what you do within it. A related assumption is that you have chosen to do what you do, and so have chosen to ‘be’ who you are. Therefore by finding out what you do, what kind of job you have, it can be shown what kind of person you ‘are’. There’s also a belief that what you have done in the past, in the form of money making, or else, preparations undertaken to make money later (education), is a crucial indicator of ‘who’ you are, or rather ‘what’ you are –how you are to be placed, how you are to be ‘weighed’.

This is all well and good if you feel at home in the system and don’t think it an insanely degenerate, absurd prison. Most people feel at home in the system and have managed to align their subjective sense of who they are with one or more of the available choices on offer as to what one can do within it.

Needless to say I do not feel at home in the system and have not been able to do this (despite trying), and this, I would wager, lies at the heart of my feeling of alienation. I am and am not the ‘being’ that fits into the system as it does. Undeniably I earn a living teaching English. But I do not do so because I want to, and certainly I do not consider myself to ‘be’ an English Teacher. However, this is how other people must view me, because this is what I do. They think I am what I don’t think I am. Rather, I am not what I am.

But it's not only in terms of your job that people will understand your identity. We realize that we don’t only work, that we have free time in which to express ourselves less formally. And so people might want to know what your interests are, what star sign you are, what your opinions are on this or that, or what your values are. They want to put you into a box and distinguish you and compare you, so they can map and chart you and see how you are similar to this template, and how different from that template, of the ways that people are imagined to be. The idea always is that you are finite and explicit and enduring over time – that you are unitary and that you can be known- that is compacted into a exclusive, specific thoughtform.

Maybe this whole ‘self-actualisation’ business is deeply flawed in its basic premise. During those times when my spiritual awareness is awoken, and when my ego doesn’t get in the way of that in a way that makes me think that I am ‘uniquely’ divine (Jehovah or otherwise), I consider myself not actually to have a self at all but to be a little part of the one true, infinite, sublime Godhead (the Pleroma to the Gnostics) which just happens to be attached to and expressing itself through this person called Jonathan Mark Tillotson, but which, in truth, is quite different from that person altogether.

I hold this body, this heart, this mind, this ‘personality’, to be just a fraction of what I am..and sometimes a poor representation of my true essence – which existed prior to the moulding of this personality into the often regrettable forms it has assumed. So you see, for me ‘self-actualisation’ is hardly a desire. Rather it is to be freed from the limitations of my self that I seek. Or at least from my lower self, my ego, my ‘sociological straightjacket’. You will understand that this is a difficult task when for so much of the year one is expected to earn money – for which the ego is a crucial prerequisite, and when everyday one is surrounded by people who identify you with your job or want you to tell them about your ego -‘the account that you give of yourself’- and so force you to wear the limiting, excluding ego mask in their interactions with you.

I am pure light, pure joy, pure love…

And its bloody annoying that I have to live inside a self, inside a world, that so often does not allow this to be apparent.

But its ok I suppose, being a slave and a prisoner of society and other peoples perceptions. Or at least or some of the time anyway…hey, sometimes even most of it. I am used to this predicament in any case.

Currently I drink a coffee and wait for my Saudi visa, which I don’t expect to get without unanticipated or anticipated hindrances.

My Weekend

Saturday night was unusual.

After eating far too much, I came home and suffered food poisoning, courtesy of a restaurant that had not advertised 'nausea-inducing efficacy' as amongst its offered ingredients.

Given our reigning taboos about defecation, I will spare you the graphic details of my experiences in that regard.

As for my vomiting, consitent with past experiences, I found it both considerably more traumatic and much more pleasurable an act in its after-effects.

Throwing up is a cataclysmic event. It was mystical in its ability to transport me to the fundamental ground of being. And so incredibly restorative! Almost immediately I felt it had done the trick, and that the only way was up. Indeed it was, for I only had to perform this labour once.

The aches in my legs, however, persisted. Ignorant as I am, I thought I'd had these because I'd spent the past 15 hours horizontally, though today I was told that this too had been virally caused.

As I was writhing around, cancelling lessons (for which I am to be rewarded with no pay) I kept telling myself I must drink, or else there'd be nothing left of me to expel. Not having anything in the fridge, and unenthused by tap water, I dragged myself, haggard and wobbling, to the nearest shopping centre (thankfully very near) and bought orange juice, citron soda and a marvellous Slovak variant of Cola called Kofola.

I also got it into my head (rightly or wrongly????) that I should eat Ice Cream. And so I did, and apart for some bread, bacon and eggs this morning, have eaten nothing else since. I have also had precisely one beer in the past 48 hours, and that was merely 2 hours ago. It must have been almost two years, since I was India, that I have gone that long without the dreaded demon.

So an unsual time for me, and vivid, despite its evident drawbacks. On balance I think I wouldn't ask for the experience again, though I suppose it's meaningful once in a while to check in on the elemental earthiness, stripped of all refinement, of the fires of mother earth.

There is more to God than God

A few nights ago I read the gnostic text, the Apocryphon of John, a heretical work. It got me thinking about the kind of issues that can effect me deeply and delight and confuse me thoroughly.

These days, contrary to 20th century secular expectations that religion is dying out, discourse about God fills the leaves and screens of our media ever increasingly. Presumably this is in reaction to 9/11, and because the occupancy of the most powerful position in the world is a born again Christian Fundamentalist. It may be for other 'background' reasons too, for example, the decline of faith in Enlightment rationality, and the perceived sense of a need for alternatives to nihilistic despair, but I certainly notice that religion, as well as its shadow- athesitic polemic- is in the headlines far more now than it was ten years ago.

What than can be said about religion?

Unsurprisingly, central to any religious discussion, must be the question of whether God exists. Surely, if he doesn't, not only is all religious activity acutely embarrassing, its also an utter waste of space..and time.

Similarly, if God does exist then embarrassment instead becomes the destiny of our atheists; simple reality joins aesthetic decorum in the argument for them to pull back the reins on their loud, screaming arrogance.

Curiously, however, within this often vigorous debate, the question of what this God actually is that is meant either to exist or not exist is seldom raised. Everyone takes it for granted that we just know what we mean when we talk about 'God'. What is meant is the 'God of Western, Non-oriental religion', the uncreated creator, the unmoved mover, who is all knowing, all powerful, all loving and absolutely everywhere. Beyond such general, philosophical characteristics he is also agreed to be the God at the the heart of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. This God has had various names: Yahweh, the Trinity, and most recently Allah. All have claimed to have had a close relationship with the third son of an idol maker called Abraham, who came from the Biblical city of Ur, possibly not far from modern day Nasiriyah in Iraq, and who was supposed to have walked the earth in about 2000BC.

Atheists say this God does not exist. Well, except as an idea, or perhaps a meme, shared amongst, and passed down by, various distinct groups of people, which has come to shape this thing called religion and religious culture, the existence of which they do not dispute, but the existence of which, at least recently, they would quite like to destroy. Meanwhile, theists of the various schools, Jewish, Christian and Islamic, in so far as they deign to give the time of day at all to the doubting Godless, assert that this very same God does exist and that his actual reality - not merely a dreamt-up idea of him - is what lies behind the establishment and historical unfolding of the religions of the west.

The level of agreement, then, between the two sides is very great. Both sides know what the other is talking about. Nobody questions the terms of the debate very much. One makes one choice and plumps for one's destiny. Leeway and wriggle room is starkly absent, a situation, it seems, approved of by both sides. No namby pamby 'ooh, i just don't know' agnosticism for us! - they broadly declaim. You are either with us, or you are with them -yuk!

What's interesting about the Gnostics, however, is that they offer an interesting third positon between the believers and unbelievers, which at the same time is the opposite of agnosticism, a position I'm sure most believe is the only alternative to belief or unbelief. They agree in part and disagree in part with what both sides say. Gnostics synthesise the debate into something refreshing. With the believers they assert that God exists, they just dont believe he is to be identified with the God of Religion. Instead, shockingly enough (shocking enough for Dawkins?) the God of Religion is actually the devil, or at the very least the 'God of this world', and not to be confused with the true God, who is perfect, pure light, to be related to through intimately intuited mystical knowledge, not fearfully through faith, worship and law. Because of their criticisms of the God of Religion, then, they agree with the atheists in opposing this God on moral grounds, accepting that this God is generally speaking a bad, or at least unnecessary, thing. At the same time, nevertheless, they disagree with the atheists about the lack of any invisible, spiritual reality behind, beyond and within the Universe's material exoskeleton.

Speaking personally, on an emotional gut level, I find Gnosticism extremely sympathetic. I do so becasue I feel it honouring and granting respect to my subjective personal spiritual life and spiritual intuitions in a way I've always found lacking from the orthodox churches. These I've perhaps too paranoically suspected ultimately believe that the important thing is to ensure, once the smiles have relaxed, the songs sung, and the nice tea drunk and put away, that what I believe about faith and morals is all squared off and tied up in the proper, received way, whatever I might feel to the contrary, the integrity of my own subjective inscape be damned.

Intellectually, as well, it seems hugely more impressive, even though its mythopoetic language and metaphysical orientation may attract scorn- albeit less hatred- from reductive materialists and scientists. Most particularly, perhaps, the greatest spur to modern atheism, the problem of evil, is at once solved. This problem asks how it is that God, assuming he is all good and all loving, as well as all powerful, can allow the amount of suffering which exists in the world to exist. Answer: becasue he is not in charge, the lesser God, the demiurge, the fallen God, as he might be termed, the prince of this world, is. Whilst the real God is all-good, and all-loving (crikey he even loves this lesser god, after all), he is not all-powerful, and this is not his world.

So this cleanses the true God of the stain of moral culpability for the aushwitzes and tsunami's of existence. And thankfully it does so without need of mainstream religion's tortuously fragile justifications, which are so often wheeled out begrudgingly to defend its God when he charged with responsibility for the evils in the world (oh, wasn't it simpler when we could just burn these bastards!). Chief of these justifications, of course, is that, despite appearances, and the vigour of common sense, the evils of the world are not the fault of this all-powerful God, but of humanity, or rather its ancestor Adam and his wife Eve, the deserved punishment for their having abused the precious gift of free will and done that most politically hideous of things - disobey God.

No, I'm much happier with the simple idea that God, like Goodness and Love itself, are absent from this planet and this world, even though they can be found, here and there, speading their light in subversively joyful ways.

Anyway, I'm not going to put myself in a box, but I certainly want to look further into this issue.

Here's a poem I wrote in 1997. I suppose it could be called Gnostic in its way:

Before the New love, the new heart

Before the new heart, the new eye

Sweet, mystical, deep, wide

Reaching towards all things

River, rock, mountain, stream

The Sun, the Moon, the Planets and Stars

And each particular thing

But especially

These vast empires and mysteries

Walking our streets, working our cities,

Lost, pitilessly dreaming,

Greasing the wheels of the system that

Plunders, in the blackening Suns of

Progress, invention, convention, detention

Of the senses in lies and fear

Towering above, invisible, insane

Inhuman hammer face of the fallen God Triumphant.

The Will to Love

Recently I wrote a piece about gnosticism which, for inexplicable reasons, blogger decided to delete just as I was uploading it. And this, despite the fact that recently it had boasted about its new capacity for an automatic saving of drafts.

So, that may have to wait awhile.

Today a Slovak friend was telling me how Revolutionary possibilites in the world have died because as soon as anyone makes a stand in any kind of efficacious direction, consumerist capitalism comes along and commodifies its productions in a way that upholds and defends the very system it explicitly challenged.

In this we see exhibited the triumph of the banal, the unopposed triumph that defines and enshrines our post post modern times.

Anyway, I agreed with him (actually the above is my paraphrasing of his position) and added there will never be anything revolutionary or novel or new happening in human society without a transformation of desire.

Hitherto moral systems that have sought to defend virtue and enforce 'the good' have sought to do so against the drift and natural inclination of our natural desires.

Because of this we witness the good so often coupled with the necessity of self-sacrifice. We are told to deny ourselves and do what we dont want to do. Only in this way do our moral efforts count. Only in this way is our virtue meaningful, only in this way is it possessed of value, does it please God, or the state, or whoever.

The problem is this kind of talk just doesnt wash anymore does it? People can't be persuaded to do what they don't want to do anymore. Indeed the very heart of our capitalist system rests upon and is the apotheosis of self-will.

Which is why the only hope, and the only sane prospect, is for people to actually want to be 'good', and to want to be selfless, and to want to serve and love their fellow men and enemies without any taint of the suspicion left lingering that what in fact they'd rather be doing, if only they were more honest, is something else altogether..

I'm not sure how this will be brought about but I'm certain that the deconstruction of the self-martyred basis of virtue is the only future of hope, and our destiny on the other side of our current decadent impasse.

p.s I am at a loss to understand why the formatting is so weird and uneven above?

On Women and Romantic Love - by Email

Elberry suggested I write up here the last paragraph of the below...love from a theological angle. I enjoy my emails to Elberry. Knowing I'm writing to him helps me organise and express my thoughts. I include the earlier sections too, though not all of the original, and I've also edited it a bit. I'm not sure why I include the earlier bits, perhaps because I'm feeling controversial.

"I know what it's like to have no desiring feelings of torment for women..it can be peaceful. Yet then suddenly someone comes into view and you feel you'd been missing something magical. But try and reach out and touch that mystique and it won't allow itself to be touched or else will transform into something bland and banal. Someone wrote that women are sphyxes without secrets....they suggest mystery and otherness but its just an illusion..hmmmm..

Certainly it does seem that once you get them talking they are more down to earth/non-abstract than men, and like Prufrock don't seem intent or set on declaring some great matter after rolling the universe into a ball.

I sometimes wrestle with guilt feelings regarding whether or not i'm a misogynist. I suppose it doesn't matter really, just as I don't matter. I think I was brainwashed to fear making misogynist remarks in my upbringing, coming as I do from a matriarchal upbringing.

It's true that for me I have sought in romantic love something transcendent, something divine,not human, something other-worldly. Nietzsche would call me weak/escapist etc. Maybe or perhaps I just have ethereal tastes? To me Jessica was like a divine feminine incarnation that spoke of some kind of redemption / perfection of existence beyond suffering and war....and its weird how seldom I thought of her erotically..the union I sought was something soulful, and mystical.

It does seem to me that women can seem very sublime? What perhaps is sublimity but the union of matter and spirit in somekind of graceful harmony?

But now I'm pretty cynical sometimes and suspect its giggling, babies, gossip and ambition for material gain that occcupies most women's thinking. Even now I shock myself fearfully with this thought. Anyway I know I ultimately mean well to women so its ok I suppose.

I suppose what I think about romantic love from a theological perpective (I theologise in waves, like the tide, not always) is that we feel it so keenly because it reminds us of the love that should be everywhere surrounding us like oxygen..and for all people. Banished as it is from the collective world, this love when we stumble upon it with one single other seems like some incredible precious jewel shining out at us in the mud. And indeed it is. But we mistakenly associate the love we feel with that person with that person exclusively instead of seeing it as something more common and universal and which could be had from and with everyone. And so we dont use that flash of illumination we experience with that other to spread light and love universally but reflect it back only on that person in a self insulating 'egoism for 2' (if the beloved loves us back) or a self-insulated unrequited love bubble. Unfortunately, unrequited love is painful and forlorn as well as delectable, and requited love involves us loving a finite receptacle that is trying to contain an infinite feeling. So after a while the love pales and fades somewhat.

Or maybe im just feeling a bit sad."

I should say of course that many men can also be incredibly superficial, so please desist from comments to that judicious effect. Anyway, not being gay I harbour less designs and expectations upon men..and so for that reason am understandably more tolerant towards them. That I am myself a man will also no doubt be a factor.

The New Jerusalem

And did those sheep in ancient times

Sing most mellifluously to me

And did those cows chomp merrily

On grass in fields surrounding me

And did those birds high in the sky

Fly round in circles most sublime

And was Jerusalem wild and free

Abundant with the finest tea.

At times I like to take famous songs and change the lyrics.

That was one verse of my new 'Jeruslam'. The words of the original were written by the poet William Blake, and the music by Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. If you don't know the tune you might feel a little lost.

I like the idea that Jerusalem, if indeed it is or was or might one be the epicentre of divine-human felicity, would manifest such in gentle and familiar ways.

A challenge at least to the fundamentalist rabble rousers.

Saudi Arabia

I am writing this, this beginning part at least, on a train hurtling across the great Hungarian plain. My coffee is splish sploshing on its saucer to my right, just out of range of my laptop. Everything I am is vibrating. The sun slants in from the right when an orange flappy curtain doesn’t object.

I feel hot. Hot is what I’ll have to get used to if I’m to live in Saudi Arabia next year. I’m waiting for an offer I’m told I should receive. From what I hear of Saudi bureaucracy, fast and efficient is rarely on the menu. We shall see. Shortly, so I’m told.

Saudi Arabia is an eccentric choice of country to work in. I’ve been gauging peoples reactions to this idea, partially because I remain susceptible to others’ approval of my actions, but also because I’m often clueless about what I want to do with my life. I sometimes look to others to somehow illuminate what I want to do in the ‘werld of werk’. This makes me the opposite of a ‘driven’ personality- what some might want to think of as a weak and waiflike figure. Float like a leaf in the wind is what I do, as a friend recently remarked, whilst referring to “Amercian Beauty”. In a Bratislavan pub the other year an Irishman said I seemed somehow disconnected from myself- perhaps I’m supposing like an unplugged lamp. Recently the mantra of the new age movement ‘find yourself’ has twice been directed at me by two separate women, in tones of tolerable but vaguely oppressive matronisation.

Of course these women are right –well, at least that I don’t have much of a self, if perhaps not that there is any ‘self’ out there waiting to be found. Women are often kind, even when sexually they don’t want you. It seems they can be very kind, full of counsel, when addressing that probably least attractive quality in a man- aimlessness (my forte). You don’t have to be an evolutionary psychologist to realize aimlessness in a male- sublime and enraptured as its aesthetic consequences might well be- is of very little value to their reproductive needs.

Is it only I who’ve noted the inverse relationship in women between their level of matronisation and their level of sexual interest in men. Women don’t want to sleep with men they mother, and don’t mother men they want to sleep with. For example, you can be a depressed, undirected wanderer, a head in the clouds loser, and yet have loads of female friends, any number of whom might want to help you; but not one of these will want to sleep with you. Well, that’s the way its seems to me, anyway (not that I’m a loser of course..oh, no!). Unless anyway, she is that rare thing “unusual”; a rare commodity in Slovakia I find.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of a move to Saudi Arabia. As you may have noticed, every advantage has a cloud, and every disadvantage a silver lining.

Disadvantages

I won’t even be able to talk to the local women, let alone be naughty with them (well, unless I want to commit suicide by way of execution (an interesting idea actually)).

I won’t be able to drink legally

I won't be able to go to the cinema.

Very little will be green.

It will be absurdly hot, a lot of the time.

Advantages

I get to earn about 16,000 pounds tax free per year in a country in which there is very little to spend money on. I get a free flat, joining, leaving and transport allowances, free health insurance, as well as 12 weeks paid holiday a year. Apparently most teachers spend only 5% of their income while in Saudi, so after the holidays I should be able to save about 12,000 pounds a year.

Not being easily able to drink (people brew their own beer, and black markets are everywhere) I shall be able to test whether I’m actually an alcoholic. I will probably also lose weight, which might make walking and generally existing inside my body a more agreeable affair.

I’ll experience what it feels like to live in a theocratic absolutist sex segregated dictatorship. Though my Public school was relatively liberal it will still be a bit like going back in time, and I’ve always had a soft spot for nostalgia.

The teaching will be undemanding and easy, and the job will not consume too much of my time. This is good, given the fact that whilst I can tolerate language instruction as a profession I have little genuine enthusiasm for it.

Actually, I’ve basically decided to accept the job if I’m offered it. After all, I can escape after three months if necessary. On the other hand, I might forever remain and turn into a permanent sand and sun exile from western decadence and develop enthusiasms for sandcastles and camel spotting.

On God, and being God

Yet if we are all God, if only we could all open up to that fact. Then the abyss between man and God (which upholds the bridge that is religion) could be dispensed with. Then nature could be transfigured and we would live in a world of rapture and joy forever, enjoying celestial dialectics of interaction and engagement, that could dispense with the dialectics of conflict and struggle which are so central to the darwinian picture in a way that would not be boring. Most people seem to think a world without conflict would be static and dull and ive always resisted that idea.

That makes me think about the Eucharist, the mass as Catholics call it, where humans eat God. Symbolically this is a powerful idea if we contrast it with how nature operates in isolation from God, whereby living beings feed off each other in a mutually perpetuating feast of death. If we ate God instead (interiorised him intimately) we would not need to war against each other as we do at every level of human society, public and private (despite the efforts of manners, custom and law to hide this).

Recently a friend recommended that I post that on my blog. It appeared as a part of a longer email in which I traversed in a way I never have before what it might mean, and why it might have been, that over the course of the past 12 years, at various times, I have considered myself to be God. Not God in a New Agey wishy washy, amorphous, lets get hippy sense, you understand, but in an upright and definitive Abrahamic sense. Catch mi drift?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I wrote about this in the context of discussing what madness is, and whether or not mad is what I am.

Anyway, whether or not I am mad, I hope the above makes plain that I never thought I was God in a way you might conventionally understand thinking oneself to be God must mean, and that the kind of God I have understood myself to be, whilst not the impersonal, undifferentiated, everythingness of Asia, was also far distant from the judgemental, all-powerful, joyless, pompous and long bearded taskmaster of popular conception.

Durham

In 1992 I would spend much of my time keeping a diary of my experiences and thoughts at Durham University, where I studied Theology. Here's an extract, fairly eccentric I would wager, about Jessica, a woman I was very much in love with; if love, at least, is something one can have at a distance, outside of the framework of a 'relationship'. She accused me once of 'worshipping' her. That upset me since worship, as I understand it, implies obsequious fawning, and I always felt I was her equal. Certainly, though, she was my epitome of the perfect woman and I still look back on her very fondly, even though we are not in touch. I've changed the names and remain somewhat anxious about the morality of posting this, since it concerns very real people and events. Still, I am not critical of anyone in it, and am presuming my readers will not know these people. I hope the real Jessica wouldn't mind my posting this. She knew I kept a diary and said once that she wanted to read it. I wonder if the real Jessica ever will, or this extract at least. I trust she is well and happy.

Wednesday 29th April 1992

After lunch visit Dunelm. See Jessica sitting down from the cafeteria queue so I buy her a coffee. My love and reverence for this rare, noble, beautiful, regenerate woman is increasing every day. My attitude towards her is cleaner, robuster, less debilitated and pathological. I expect less that she be something towards me, something maternal, sagacious, medicinal, self-sacrificial. I have stopped waiting for her to invite me into her intimate life, to admit me into her closest affections. More upright, more self-possessed, self-directed- it is possible for me to interact with her in a far more healthy and constructive basis than ever. I want things between us to be as they were in the Autumn of 1990. I think I will marry someone like Jessica (I've made similar remarks about Emma, haven't I?) She does not need philosophy or intellectualism -she is an incarnation of the rich, strong, fecundity and balance of healthy life, of mother nature, of the archetypal Gaia. In her person and action she allows one the beautiful and emboldening illusion that life, in its totality, lacks all the forms and traces of sickness, darkness, obscurity, which at other times seem oppressively blatant, that life itself, our life, this life, is already heavenly, i.e, ascended above the cruel cycle and decadent prisons of humanity's dark night, that the sun in all its primordial resurrecting potency, is no longer a potential dream, but a full shining unmistakable fact, towering its way up into the infinite vault of day. Jessica resembles the sun, light, bright, warming and loving....when have I heard her bitch about or scathe other people, or complain pointlessly about her own weaknesses and suffering?

To conclude- Jessica, a paragon of day worth knowing, a dear precious friend, rich in affirmation and ascending future, a promise of good health, an incarnation of peace, a "Sacred Yes".

We go to lunch at Vennel's. She eats a mushroom and onion pate salad and I drink a hot chocolate. Then we go shopping, I buy some tea bags, biscuits and sugar. We go back and watch the 80's music video and drink tea. Jessica is interested in a guy named Jimmy. She keeps praising him. She has grown bored of Richard, poor boy- though I knew that. Whenever I hear that she's bored of Richard my heart grows excited but she always mentions somebody else, Luke last term or Jimmy this. I am jealous of Jimmy. A side of me would love Jessica to want to fuck me, to have a relationship with me, to revere me as she seems to revere him. At certain moments I am very sexually attracted to Jessica. All I want to do is climb into bed with her. But I can handle reality, my illusions are comforting and beautiful, but not necessary, I can rise above them and endure their unreality.

Leave at about 4.40 and carry on reading Nietzsche. Finish at 9.40, then listen to the Lords and New creatures until James comes in for Coffee. Jessica calls me out of my study at around 11.00. She came as I expected her to, as we planned that she would. Tea and a joint downstairs. Listen to Luke's rave music.

Thursday 30th April 1992

After dinner I visit Jessica and Liz. They're both tired, having both been pissed last night. I make Jessica a tea and one for myself, using my own "FINE FLAVOUR " tea bags. Top of the pops in on the T.V. Liz opens a bottle of wine. Jessica looks beautiful, gorgeous, nothing else, as she lies languidly and to be honest seductively on the bed. They ask me how my day went...sweet, though I find in hard to scan back at once. I unthinkingly say the wine is "cheap", a shocking comment or so it turned out. Jessica then turned on me and gently scolded me for such an attitude, in view of the fact that I always drink their tea. Not on this occasion, obviously..but that doesn't matter. I feel a bit upset, though into her words I'm sure she put very little, if any weight. I leave, feel mildly angry and read "Existentialism" down at the Traveller's Rest and The Big Jug, surrounded in each case by Geordies.

To speak or not to speak

Aware of something
Resisting mind's clasp
Wrapped on event and things
Let beauty, let possibility be defiance.

Words impose opposites to what is meant
Take us further from contact than silence
Sometimes.

Could words open like flowers
Pollinate mindfields with mystic fecundation?

That would be nice.

The Second Coming

And I shall come again, in peace
To neither judge the living nor the dead
But to set them free from their chains

And I shall come again
To set aglow a fire of still rapture
In the hearts of all flesh

And then in that day
In the day of my coming
No man shall say to his neighbour
"You are wrong"
For all shall be right
And all shall be wrong
And all shall know that all are right
And all shall know that all are wrong - partly

And error will be clumsy and humourous

In the event

If I suddenly died my password would die with me. Not only would my blogs permanently cease, but nobody would have access to my email account either. All emails would be unsurprisingly unanswered and people whom I only have contact with by email would not know I had departed. Nor could they be told.

Do you think yahoo and blogger etc grant password access to next of kin in the event of a demise. Somehow I doubt it. And then within a month everything just vanishes anyway. From Yahoo at least.

I suppose this scenario must have already happened on more than a few occasions.

Perhaps I should put my password in an envelope marked 'in the event'.

Golly.

Deadly Cocks

Asking Americans to give up their guns is like asking them to give up their cocks.

According to a female friend in San Francisco, the above statement was vulgar. She noted I tend to be vulgar when Im depressed, which was news to me, but possibly true.

But I wonder what makes it vulgar. Would it have been vulgar if id referred to the unlikehood of Americans giving up their penises?

Ok, maybe the gun mania isnt only due to Americans phallic-destructive complex (which they do not entirely unshare with the rest of the disappointing humans)...; it might also have something to do with the fact that Americans are scared shitless of each other.

Is that why they are so friendly and bubblegum sweet to each other. A defensive push away masked in shiny fakery. Paradox sleeps with truth regularly, I find.

Not that I dont love Americans of course.

p.s. this keyboard has no apostrophes. No joke. Apostrophes to follow.

Drowned

Everyday endless words spew from the mouths and fingers of humans. Such a drag. Why can't words be uttered that actually make a difference?

What would such words be, what would they say?

This I have often wondered. Im not sure I know. Maybe if they were as wondrous as a gorgeous woman fucking.

The universe is not absurd, life is not absurd. What is absurd is the response of humans to it. Every argument, every stance, every position is perfectly rebutted by opposing propositions, as if what mattered was not making discoveries but keeping the world in balance.

People take sides and choose their allegiance. What matters is not truth but that understanding reflect prejudice and desire. Meanwhile they pretend what they believe is right and don't care to prove it. It is enough if they can sufficiently insult their rivals.

Here the passion to open the eye gates into our kingdom
Set in the faraway valley of mists
Where the green butterfly treads over my heart
Where silent arboreal shadows of ancient rhythmic cymbals
Play out the vast sonorous love of God.

Stay with me, Golden lady
Stay with me, hold me
I do not want to die
I do not wish to fall with a frozen breath from the insane
Zeal of this high mountain.

The still moments, You can remember
When everything hung breathless, as if paralysed
In wait for the return of splendour
When to be was not to live but to be beyond life
In the enfolding love of a sacred womb
Heaving a chorus of light.

Down through the silent corridor
Past the windows
Into a clearing, bright and wide
You are here, the waterfalls surround you.

Proceed further to the place of dying music
Alone now in the shuddering quiet....be still
Is that your father sweeping the leaves into a crisp pile beside the rotten fence
Is that your Mother crying in the corner?
Yes?....No?....Where are you going?
Again
Where are you going?

This way, follow
Hands by your side
Tears pressing the skullbone hollow and mad
A small white cup of black coffee is all you'll get
In this sunken chamber where your friends
Guides in this desert of hell
Sit round you strangely, always removed, in a different world
Here to mock and cheer you for a few hours
One void to another in a cave of smiling skulls.

Now come further, around the corner, across the meadow
The bridge is green, green and fuming
Robin.....Is that you???
Watch out! you're eyes, they'll burn
The maiden is taunting, always she taunts....why?
What do you do?
Pity the lost sapphire of fire.
When heaven is raped the angels weep but we know the devils rule
We know our state
We know the sunrise glimpsed over our aching ruin
Was denied by everyone and fled
Call it back, bring it back, bring it back, bring it back
No, too late
Too late
Too late
Falling
Falling
Into an empire of dust
Dust in your eyes, dust under your feet and lights scattered weirdly
This is the land where everything screams
This is the land where nothing is but paralysed lust for hollow dreams
The land, the land
Of dust, of dust
The land of private howling.

The voices are washed
They do not slaughter
But the cruel dawn nears
The savage winds of light arise.

Enough
Did you sleep well?
Here, I've made you a nice cup of tea
Says Mother misunderstanding to a strange child.

Hello

If everything we have to say is worthless and contributes nothing new to the universe, it's a wonder why we bother writing or speaking at all?

Or probably we'd want to get rid of the silence, and so we'd talk just to pepper the void with spice.

One of the features of our decadent culture is that everything has already been said. Nothing is new, the depths have been plumbed, production is merely re-production, re-packaging in an altered guise.

Or perhaps I'm wrong.

I once said to myself that I would be happy if I could experience just 5 minutes of genuine life, genuine potency, standing before life without the veil. Then another time I said a great ambition would be to write a sentence, just one sentence, that would explode and destroy the universe. By which I implied that afterwards it would be resurrected and reconfigured in an authentic form.

But maybe one of the weirdest thoughts I had was when I was about 6 and sitting in a church with my Mum. I couldn't believe I was actually alive, that I had been born. It seemed such a strange condition to find myself in. It definitely felt like I had existed before my birth. But I had no memories of any previous human incarnation, and still haven't. Perhaps this was when I first started thinking I might be God. Such was my sense of weirdness and alienation from others, this seemed like a suitable identity. Maybe this also explains why I've always taken the idea of God both seriously (I'm pretty sure I exist after all) on the one hand- always feeling I knew what was right and wrong in theology- and somewhat irreverently on the other (I can laugh at my self after all).

Yes, thats right..thats me..another one of those fellows who feels he's got his own personal hotline to the uncreated, who indeed is a receptacle of eternity and infinity.

I suppose that might be a pretty good definition of insanity, in the eyes of many?

Of course insanity is an absolutely respectable poistion to hold..provided you have a private income and don't have to pretend to be sane on a regular basis in order to make money. Or so long as you can go mad in a way shared by millions of others.

Saturday

Many many years ago today a man called Jesus may or may not have been lying dead in a grave in a town called Jerusalem. It must have been dark in there, what with the big egg shaped stone blocking the entrance (i was one told it was egg shaped..honest). This, no doubt, would not have bothered him if he were indeed dead or if, as some believe, he was in some kind of temporary coma. If he was both alive and conscious, however, he must have been pretty freaked out I reckon.

Even if you accept the Orthodox account that he died on the cross and was buried there, he still presumably experienced some time alive in the dark at the moment when he resurrected and before the early sunday light welcomed him back to the land of his murderers. Ok, this might have only been a few seconds. Or maybe he hung around for awhile waiting for the right time to make his move. I wonder how for how long exactly; when exactly did he wake from his sojourn in Hades (where one hopes he preformed more than a few miracles?).

Maybe the angel (or was it angels, I forget) who told Mary of Jesus' resurrection actually performed the resurrection on Jesus in the same way Jesus resurrected Lazarus? Hmmm, now there's a thought. Scripture, after all, does say God 'rose' Jesus from the dead and not that Jesus raised himself. Angels have been known, on more than a few occasions, to perform God's bidding. If this happened, maybe it was never dark in the cave at all, not at least when Jesus awoke. The natural angelic luminosity of the Messenger/s would have invested the little cave with light even while he was dead.

Or maybe he wasnt there at all, maybe he hadn't died on the cross at all (after all, he hadn't been up for vary long had he?), maybe he hadn't even been crucified? Or maybe he was there in the grave and was dead, and like most dead people, being dead remained dead. As a permanently dead person, maybe he remained dead where he was, or maybe he was somehow spirited away as a dead person by living people good at bribing Roman guards to be and remain dead somewhere else....maybe in India no less! No, perhaps not India. If he is buried as some say in India, I reckon he probably walked there while alive.

Blah blah blah....

When I was studying Theology one of my lecturers wondered why there are never any Theological jokes. I know what he means. In this my piece above I suppose I was trying to be funny. I imagine that to some/many(?) trying to be funny about Christianity necessarily means being cynical about Christinaity..and that therefore I am an unbeliever etc. But I am not an 'unbeliever'. And I am not a 'believer' either. I am what I am (surprise surprise) and do not belong to a label. It is also no great revelation to say that what happened to Jesus on that Saturday/Saturday had nothing to do with me (unless I'm actually God, or at least some part of me is?), and so does not depend on what I think about it.

Suffice it to say my point is that finding something humorous or seeking to find humour in something, does not necessary mean that one is being derisory or cynical about it.

I think if I rose from the dead I'd probably rather do it with a luminous angel present than in the dark, that's for certain. Anyway, that's for tomorrow. Todays is raiding hell day. Whooppeee!