Reflections
Some Paradoxical Words about my Personal Experience
TODAY, SOME PARADOXICAL WORDS ABOUT MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE. It was going to be a 3rd person poem but it’s come out in a more prosaic manner. To some, these words will seem crazy. To others (maybe just a few — maybe none at all!), they will ring so true that bells will peal in your hearts. It is with you who I share them for your encouragement.
To say “No”
ONE OF THE GREATEST LESSONS I have learned in the last 6 months is to say “No” to (and walk right away from) things which — though they may glitter and appear superficially attractive — I discern to be at best worthless (of no real value), at worst potentially destructive. I’m speaking here not only about material acquisitions but also about relationships with people. This has been liberating and I would recommend it to all without hesitation. With practice, it gets even easier. However, it should not be used in a cavalier or whimsical way but with discretion, as something serious and life-enhancing. Be prepared, though — in terms of the direction this world is taking — to end up with nothing (or next to nothing) and no one (or almost no one). 😉
As I write in this Café
AS I WRITE IN THIS CAFÉ, there are 18 people of all ages sat around a large table next to mine. They are the only people in here apart from me. They are all avidly communicating, yet it is TOTALLY silent in here. I am so moved that I have tears streaming onto my smiling face. They are animatedly signing to each other with their hands. Some are clearly more extrovert; some more reserved. It is so beautiful to behold. I have sometimes been able to simulate the blanket darkness of blindness; but I have never been able to simulate the strange silence of deafness. We take our senses for granted when we have them all. The proficient communication of these folks here humbles me and makes me appreciate anew the gift of hearing. Yet, in a sense, here are these lovely people who have learned to appreciate (and I hope you will understand me here aright) the gift of deafness (which gift I cannot now know). The life we have been given is a gift, whatever “deficiencies” we may think that we have. Even the “deficiencies” are part of the gift — a test for us to grasp and enjoy to the full…
When I was 8 Years Old
WHEN I WAS 8 YEARS OLD, I had a very close friend. We did lots of stuff together. We had the same humour, saw a lot of things the same way. We made things together, got up to mischief together, faced the music together. We were like the kind of intrepid friends you’d find in an Enid Blyton adventure novel or a Boy’s Own Annual comic escapade. Some even said we were like twins. We were always honest with each other — had no secrets from each other. We had a kind of pact that we shared everything. I told him everything. Would never have even dreamt of deceiving him. One day, he told me that he’d found some gold nuggets. I asked him to show them to me. He said that he couldn’t and then disclosed that he’d stored them in a hole in the ground under a tree in his garden. He had a strange look on his face which I hadn’t seen before — like someone who has been caught in the act — and, for the first time, I felt throughout my whole being that he wasn’t telling me the truth. This disturbed me deeply. Why would he lie to me? What would be the point? It struck at the very heart of our friendship, so it seemed to me, for it was a betrayal of trust. How would I ever know if he was being honest with me again? I had to know for sure. So, the next day I went to his garden and I found the tree and I dug, so as to discover for myself. About six inches down, there they were. But they were not gold nuggets. They were ordinary stones that had been covered very badly with gold paint. I was gutted. Suddenly, he came flying out of his house and ran towards me in the garden. He was in a terrible rage and his face was distorted with a fury such as I had never seen before in anyone (though I have on many occasions since). It was as if he was possessed by some crazy demon. As I said to him: “They’re only stones!” he began to rain blows down upon me with all his force and was screaming like a madman. His mother then appeared and began to restrain him. She seemed as surprised as I was, for we had never argued once or had a cross word. I ran out of that garden as fast as I could and, to this day, I have never seen him again. I learned much that day about the explosive power of truth, the exposure of lies and the importance of trust at the heart of a relationship. How different it could have been if he had appeared from his house with the kind of soft and cheeky/smirky face I had always known and said: “Okay. You got me. I don’t know why I said that. I think I was trying to impress you. It was so stupid of me. I knew you’d see through it. It will never happen again. Pax?” And he would have been instantly forgiven. Beautiful relationships are saved through honesty and humility. Yet, that kind of pointless deception still happens to this day; though I don’t know why they persist in doing so as I always see through it in the end. And, like clockwork, they always seem to react the same way — with aggression rather than contrition. Hell hath no fury like someone who’s been “rumbled”. But I have never let that fury deter me from the quest for beauty, truth and love. No. Stone. Unturned. It’s the only way.
Is there a Gap?
IS THERE A GAP between the online “persona” which we present here and the person who we are in real life? That is the question. It is so easy to devise a squeaky-clean idealised image and present it here, replete with attractive selfies, pics of cute pets, dynamic yoga poses, quotes from Gandhi, Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama, inspirational soundbites and carefully-airbrushed clips of generalised life-information. Not only can villains reinvent themselves online but even the most seemingly principled people can, to a lesser degree, do this unconsciously — gradually building a composite picture which is based more on an ideal than reality. So does the ultra-loving, highly-evolved, super-spiritual, debonair, civilised, ripped, six-packed, impeccably-manicured and coiffed, caring, hyper-handsome, excruciatingly beautiful Wonder Woman or New Man pose which we assume online reflect the real people who we are in our everyday reality? 
🙂 If not, then we are living a schizoid existence in which we become pathologically dissociated from truth/reality and live in a chimeric manufactured fantasy world. Social media provides the ultimate fertile territory for this, where one can build a list of pseudo-friends who we can bewitch with our carefully-woven web of concoctions, outright lies and carefully-constructed half-truths. A good antidote to this is to ensure that a healthy smattering of friends who know us well In Real Life is mingled with the virtual ones on our lists of friends on social media. The presence here of real life friends is going to keep us grounded and realistic about who we make ourselves out to be online (especially if they lovingly call us out when we exaggerate, fabricate or over-inflate!). If we are 100% honest online, then we will attract the kind of people as virtual friends who we would want to go on to have as friends in real life too. So… I here lay myself wide open for scrutiny and hope that all my virtual friends do so too. Let’s get real!
Why I’ve been so Quiet Lately
HAVING RECEIVED SOME KIND MESSAGES asking why I’ve been so quiet lately, I thought I’d better say something. The fact is that I’ve been completely rethinking my entire existence. A while back (beginning in 2011 and solidifying in 2012), as some of you know, I put myself into a kind of voluntary mental / emotional / spiritual exile which started off in an ivory tower (in Sweden), transitioned to a hermitage (in Spain) then morphed into a bare blasted basement (in Germany) — though I still went through the visible motions of “normalcy”. Some de-structive movement had been intensifying within me which was to do with elements disintegrating and dying. It has been as if an acid wind was howling through my whole being, blasting it into dust (see picture). The pain (not physical) was excruciating, like being on the rack. I almost felt as if I was under a curse and everything (even all precious things) were being stripped away from me by force. Yet, at the same time, a kind of calm sense of acceptance descended on me and I have simply been bemused by the whole process. When I came to Berlin I was fully expecting to die in some soonish time. (Some perceptive people detected this in my poetry). I had given up, though I was creating like a whirlwind more than ever. (These last three years have yielded many poems and songs — nearly 600 — both dark and light, which is as it should be). I reached my lowest ebb around Christmas 2014. But as the end of the year approached, some strange and surprising shift occurred. That shift then turned into a tsunami during January which has altered everything. Now, with half the solar system’s heavenly bodies in my sun-sign (Pisces), I seem to be poised on the edge of a newness for which I can hardly find the words. (“Astronomical” is one). I can’t say anything more about this now as it is an incomplete process and I am awaiting ratification and confirmation. But within the next couple of months the view from where I am sitting could look very different. Before that couple of months is complete, you will be the first to know. To those who have taken an interest, thank you from my heart for being there…
There’s a Concert coming up
THERE IS A CONCERT COMING UP in Berlin on 20th January, the thought of which is already going through me like a whirlwind. I am so excited about it that I can hardly even think straight! Two of my favourite musical works ever. An emotional maelstrom of music written in the 1930s. Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto in D minor (1939) and Dmitri Shostakovich’s monumental 4th Symphony in C minor (1936). To programme these two pieces in the same concert is a stroke of genius as they are woven from very similar cloth. Britten wrote his concerto on the eve of the Second World War when he was just 26 years old. It is a 30-minute outpouring of passion for life in the face of the impending horror of war. Wrapped up in a strangely exotic Mediterranean lustre, with an almost gypsy feel at times in the violin (both vivace tempestuous and lingeringly impassioned), it powerfully demolishes your composure and cuts you to the quick. Getting through it without tears is strictly for psychopaths. Of all violin Concertos (alongside Shostakovich’s 1st Violin Concerto), it is my favourite. Shostakovich’s 4th Symphony is what he later called his “problem child”. The problem was that, at 29 years old, he had composed a kaleidoscopic vortex of emotion (clearly influenced by Mahler) which he knew the Stalin regime would suppress. His opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, had already been denounced by Stalin as “chaos not music”. In those days, one had to create optimistic art which glorified the workers and the regime. Any hint of melancholia was likely to be accused of “bourgeois formalism” or other such politically correct nonsense! So he took the step of withdrawing the symphony and it didn’t have its first performance until 25 years later, after Stalin had died. It wasn’t that he was frightened of Stalin. In fact, Stalin was frightened of HIM. While Shostakovich watched almost all his artistic friends being assassinated or disappeared after a “3 0’clock knock” (the early hours visit which they would receive from the secret police), he survived because Stalin superstitiously accorded the composer “yurodivy” status, as if he was some kind of prophet who must not be touched. The composer encoded many dissident references into his works, for example through the use of Russian folk song and even in special notation. While the rest of the world was whooping with delight that Hitler was gone and Europe was free, Shostakovich knew otherwise. Thus the deep melancholy which pervades much of his work was directed at the fact that Bolshevism had descended into the same kind of totalitarianism which it had purported to overthrow. For me, his 4th Symphony is the most important of his fifteen symphonies, as he himself called it his “composer’s credo.” One has to take notice of that. While the whole symphony is like a crazy journey through a myriad themes and moods, somehow it all leads inexorably to a jaw-dropping coda which is both shattering and epic. In fact, I first became aware of this symphony in the 1980s when the coda was being played as soundtrack music, alongside Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”, in a BBC documentary about outer space. Yes, that’s where this symphony takes you! I am determined to get to this concert on the 20th. It will be a life-changing experience (the only kind of experience in which I am now interested).
The Hidden Effects of being a Whistleblower
I’m just having an interesting correspondence with a highly-respected clinical psychologist I worked with more than 30 years ago and haven’t had contact with since. We were both involved in whistleblowing an exposé of sustained physical abuse as part of the treatment system in a showcase children’s assessment centre. I’m speaking about aggressive power-games by staff on children, beatings-up, threatenings, subtle and outright cruelty of many kinds — even forcing children as young as five years old to eat their own vomit. I had worked closely undercover with an investigative journalist on The Guardian newspaper; and after a couple of months of evidence-gathering the story broke on the front page of the paper. As you can imagine, all hell broke loose as the local authority council and department of social work set about covering their asses. Shortly after, a Public Inquiry, presided over by a judge, was held during which potential witnesses were plainly bribed or threatened and mass betrayals took place by people who had promised to testify against the centre. My legal representative at the Inquiry (who was actually a lawyer for the National Council for Civil Liberties — what a joke!) behaved like an imbecile. (I later discovered he was in the same Freemason’s lodge as the Director of Social Services 
😉 ). The police had also aggressively tried to threaten me to drop my witness-stance (they had been involved in the abuse too, beating kids up, covering up, etc.). Needless to say, the directors of the childen’s centre were eventually declared to be the innocent victims of a smear campaign. It was a total debacle.
Wanted: Time-Machine
Similar to picture but any style considered. Must be in full working order. Able to traverse many centuries. Needed urgently by poet wishing to return to his old haunts in the medieval era, when patronage was standard for troubadours; when women did not fear eloquence, intensity and power in a man but absolutely demanded it; when towns and villages would gather in the square to listen to poetry and music; when gallantry was the norm; when a song could cause a stir; when you made your own furniture; when a horse would be the only friend you’d need; when you knew who the evil barons were and could deal with them; when small things mattered; when a poem could break a heart or mend it; when you really could go off to find your fortune; when your life would be ever so brief but oh so brave.
I wanted to be a Hermit
I WANTED TO BE A HERMIT on a mountain for a reason. More than one reason. Many reasons! And I’ve done it. I always end up regretting it when I try not to be a hermit. But then, when I become more of a hermit, a little voice says to me: “You were put in this world for a purpose. Get out there and do it”. So I go back down the mountain. Then when it all becomes too much (which it always does), I go back up. Down then up. Down then up. And so on. Just being alive nearly kills me. The truth is that there is a huge sense in which I am happiest on the mountain. There. I said it…
The Naked Troubadour 