Allegory

How I love organic thinking!

I am airy, lofty and quite serene right now. From where I sit on my bed I can see a still life of fruit and a Japanese woodcut calendar; reflections of real life in both mirror and window. I see my ancestor, the Poplar tree, loftily embracing the Northerly wind while the evergreen Magnolia shudders agedly.

My loftiness perhaps comes from a beautiful and much needed walk I had with a friend last night up to the Brooklyn wind turbine. From there we could see the golden night shroud upon the city, the busy clouds, and the sky bleeding upwards from the horizon. Clouds. Stars. A cradle half moon that since 5 hours earlier had turned 180 degrees to stable itself from falling forwards.

Golden germinating sparks of the night; a fence-line. A rusted lock that once it had torn its last ligament felt eerily through space, never fallen on the bedrock below.

The shadows covered; the past became darkness, the future black and white; while the present my eyes were shut tightly against.

Once, in my inner eye, the shadow had past I looked down to see an ocean so vast, so colourful; so beckoning. On the wings of the present tide I could see each drop of that ocean was a

Story

A life

A history

A fragment of somebody’s everything.

The sweat off my brow fell drip

By drip

Adding to the salt stories of insecurity

The unjust wars fought

The memorials raised

The omniscient wave that is the spirited land

Engulfing us all.

The Nelson. The King’s country.

Te Rerenga Wairua

The underworld

The leaping off place of spirits.

I smiled into the night

Watching the wind rustle the Pine trees;

Then the two toned face that broke forth into historia

From a bellowing force deep within

That was sincere,

Beautiful

Elevating.

The large portion of humble pie eaten

When starting each magnificent verse

With a self deprecating ‘so’.

I digress!

When I originally saw your above message, I pondered at the profundity of such a question. I am still not sure I understand what you ask?! I love the collaboration of a capitalised ‘M’ in ‘Man’ and ‘garb’; both give a Biblical resonance, and I automatically want to launch into the history of the cassock and vestment.

But somehow, I don’t believe my true answer lies in that history/etymology.

Instead I wonder  about the ‘girl’ cells that Eve Ensler (feminist) talks about being inherent in all genders. This so called ‘cell’ embodied in ‘compassion, empathy, passion, vulnerability, openness, intensity, association, relationship and intuition’.

This may be a far cry but I find it interesting that clothing for men in history has been very similar to what we would typically call ‘female’ clothing now, and that with the rise of patriarchy men’s clothing has become more restrictive; and literally so around the area where ‘manhood’ is inherent.

As Eve Ensler says in her talk (‘Embrace your inner girl’)

’And I want you imagine that at some point in history a group of powerful people invested in owning and controlling the world understood that the suppression of this particular cell, the oppression of these cells, the reinterpretation of these cells, the undermining of these cells, getting us to believe in the weakness of these cells and the crushing, eradicating, destroying, reducing these cells, basically began the process of killing off the girl cell, which was, by the way, patriarchy.’

To end this night I shared, hesitantly, Arundhati Roy’s thoughts on empire:

'Whose God decides which is a "just war" and which isn’t? George Bush senior once said: "I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are." When the president of the most powerful country in the world doesn’t need to care what the facts are, then we can at least be sure we have entered the Age of Empire.

So what does public power mean in the Age of Empire? Does it mean anything at all? Does it actually exist?

In these allegedly democratic times, conventional political thought holds that public power is exercised through the ballot. Scores of countries in the world will go to the polls this year. Most (not all) of them will get the governments they vote for. But will they get the governments they want?'

I leave you with these questions of beauty, of patriarchy, our innate cells and needs; my love.

Quixotic

Part I

A thunderstorm is advancing;

13 kilometres away? Perhaps 13 light years?

13 divine paces?

Or sunshine itself manifest in the 

13 byronic verses of jibber jabber?

Regardless,

Exalting!

What perturbed clouds;

Wafting, drifting, folding, encapsulating

All encompassing!

Listlessly,

Wistfully so.

Walked to the wind turbine yesterday morning at 10am

With a serious young man;

As troubled as I am

About the pontifix of reality

Standing upright on our existentially wounded shoulders of youth,

Now barraged with adulthood.

From up there we could see clouds drift Wellington-wide,

The burden below of phallic symbols against nature:

But mostly we were drowning in the wondrous twirling

Vapourous, billowish, blithesome  forms

Sliced, dispersed,

Then recreated

 Circulated

By albatross wingspan-turbine blades.

Yes, the pilgrimage back to nature.

Part II

The windy, wafty, stirring moment continued

After the fennel was torn to adorn sustenance;

Faith and grace restored in the one lonesome red potato of the gutters of Brooklyn.

Later I lay witness to transcendence in its purest manifestation yet,

Speechlessness incited later lest the sacred dispel too swiftly.

With love, with Rumi poetry, my eyes were opened

With the Koran my soul swelled, and healed

With slow turning I became absent to the world

And the ‘lover’ of a black circle ringed in red.

In the bowing

I became a manifestation of God

I brushed God on the cheek

After witnessing the intrinsic purity

That glazed the eyes of God.

The transcendental, veritable impelling whirling.

(Is this a tourism wanting to learn spiritual,

An exotic wonderment,

I suspect I treat it; I cringe)

I, the 'lover’,

Brushed with God;

The eddying white gown 'washed' over my lap.

Exalted, I did cry.

A natural state to be in;

So simple, so critical

To acknowledge oneself

Others

As God/Universal being manifest.

Essential

To wash away one's ego

With hands raised to gain God’s grace

The other transferring this grace to humanity

Continually, forever humbled

By the forbearance of a hat/tombstone.

What symbolism, what love; what awakenings!

Part III

Later still,

In the caress of love and honesty

Ginsberg, Rumi, Gibran, and Exupery

Hearkened my sated ears

With forbiddance, weariness, ascetism, sorrow

Delight, kindred curiosity and love.

As I reflect on love, life and the churning wheel of desire

Rumi whispers to me

He is awashed in Persian colours and calligraphy

With downward eyes,

Feett poised assertively on ancestral alluvium

Perceptive, omniscient; mystical.

'We are as the flute, and the music in us is from thee;
we are as the mountain and the echo in us is from thee.

We are as pieces of chess engaged in victory and defeat:
our victory and defeat is from thee, O thou whose qualities are comely!

Who are we, O Thou soul of our souls,
that we should remain in being beside thee?

We and our existences are really non-existence; 

thou art the absolute Being which manifests the perishable.

We all are lions, but lions on a banner:
because of the wind they are rushing onward from moment to moment.

Their onward rush is visible, and the wind is unseen:
may that which is unseen not fail from us!

Our wind whereby we are moved and our being are of thy gift;
our whole existence is from thy bringing into being.'

Nude

Sorry I have left this so long, but had to given the weight of your incredible arguments. I even had to copy and paste them into a word document to properly digest them!!

What is it about a Utopian concept do you not believe in? The word in itself means an ‘ideal’ does it not. Or, is it the burden that weighs heavily on the past ‘failed’ utopias; the projection we have on them? Or is it that fact that one ideal cannot suit everybody’s ideals equally?

I agree we are prone to weakness as humanity, but then I look towards the beauty inherent in civilisations across the world of which the extent we possibly don’t know. What about those who live by land, for the land and only take so much that they can give back? What of those who believe everything is community, and that community extends beyond a human realm; but to nature, animals. The ecology that surrounds them?

We have distilled this out of our lives, slowly but surely, even those (like myself) who believe themselves to be making an effort in their lives to be sustainable (dare I use that overly used word!). Part of me is very inspired by Ian McHarg’s ‘Design with Nature’ particularly his chapter ‘The Plight’ (can’t find it online unfortunately) -it has a beautiful balance between pessimism and optimist, creation and desecration; anger and hope.

Do you think our pursuit of individualism is actually true? Is it not hypocritical that this post modernist line of thought drives for ‘individualism’ but at the same time says we must ALL believe in the same ‘dream’ to be successful? So are we really that individualistic in our needs, at a raw, visceral level?

Do you think the very thing suppressed currently now would heighten our aspects of our selves without threatening the rest of our community? Is it not creativity that should be driven into our lives? Doesn’t individualism just push for selfishness and enlarged and enraged egos?

I am not sure whether we are actually that different in emotional, physical and spiritual needs!!

I am not convinced that these more ‘technological’ materials for buildings in Frescoe’s project are more sustainable. Even before their conception I feel they have unbalanced the scales of ethicality. What about the water, our prized resource, to create these materials? What about the oil used for the plastics, and structural steel/iron etc? What about the insensitivity of placing a large population in high rises; that will result in a huge problems given that a basic human need is to be on the ground. What about the artificial environments these places create? Is it not the environment we surround our self in, make who we are essentially? So the further removed we are from the ground, the more removed we are from nature for sure?

I agree the vision is bold and grand. But given the incredible buildings we still have standing today 2 or 3 thousand years on from their building is testament to just how sustainable traditional building materials are. Also, on a basic level we should take from the earth what can be taken back to the land without affecting it (I advocate mud architecture!!). Times come and go. We, ourselves, are here for the shortest amounts of time. What do we know about these technological advanced materials really when all things are considered?

And besides, I believe that it isn’t necessarily the tool but more how we use the tool. I think a nice example is how we tend to warm our whole room/house in winter thus using resources we can’t afford to use in such quantities. A Japanese tradition (and many other traditions for sure) is to have a little fire under the low table they are sitting at which warms only the people sitting at the table.

In something as simple as this, there is sensibility.

There are buildings already built, why not adapt them for our use? Why tear them down and start again? They must be durable to have lasted thus far.....

I have never heard of ‘Radiating Democracy’ to be honest. I love your description of it. I think to have the core light would be guiding. But once again, how do the ‘lights’ get voted? Could this be a system easily corrupted? Or perhaps at times I can have too little faith in humanity.

But no, I don’t! I believe we are conscious of what is happening to us. We just have a money heavy system holding us down, more than holding us down; more like the moloch of Ginsberg poem:

‘What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!’

Education, in my opinion, is permeable! Education isn’t reading and writing if you don’t want it to be. Education is experience and intuition, curiosity and love. Education gets you through life, not a career. Education is not to be generalised. With our 7 billion people education could never be the same except with the basic rule of intuition.

But ofcourse, this is with my enormous trust in humanity that our ‘right’ sides rule of our ‘wrong’. This is where I assume that in a stable, steady environment we are instruments of love, charity , hope and inspiration.

In conclusion, I am an idealist! I have no fear of idealism, I think it keeps me hopeful, curious and perpetually enamoured by life. But this leaves one logistical problem; how does one bridge our present reality with the ‘ideal’ of the above, or dare I say, this utopia!!

I believe firstly we need Capitalism to fail and instead a steady rise of un-hierarchical democracy, whether it be radiant or grassroots. I believe that we need to get to the crux of our needs in this change, in the breaking of the Capitalism back. We need to revalue our lives, the lives of others, and those of past ‘failed’ peoples such as the Rapanui on Easter Island. We need to learn intuitively, un-agressively, non-competitively and realise that we all fight the same battles, or live the same dream.

This might be all very well, and nauseatingly beautiful and unachievable (!!), but how do we break the rearing horse’s back? Is boycott the answer to Capitalism’s fall? Is the oil going to run out? Is World War III going to rage and an environmental bomb (if one hasn’t already fallen) going to timely end our ignorance and plundering?

Or is it simply a patient wait, where we make the most of what we have. Where we simplify our lives, re-assert our balanced values and wait and trust in Gaia to choose what she wants?

Bleed

While the clouds bleed upwards

While Joni Mitchell sings anthems

I am exalted;

Relaxed, free, and spinning wildly.

Pausing

I stand at the back door to the course

(An end of yet another era)

Watching understated clouds

Against Petone’s dark sprouting green hill

Russian tragedy backdrop

Reacting to many a million moment past;

‘Tears and fears and feeling proud,

To say I love you right out loud

Dreams and schemes and circus crowds

I’ve looked at life that way.

But now old friends are acting strange

They shake their heads, they say I’ve changed

Well some things lost, but some things gained

In living every day.

Oh I’ve looked at life from both sides now

From win and lose, and still some how

Its life’s allusions I recall

I really don’t know life at all.’

At this acme I feel such loss, such ensuing emptiness.

Could it be

Nobody’s immediately here to have

My happiness?

My friends,

The beacons of awareness and street wisdomry

Who many an hour winnow;

Biding atomic seconds with such obsolescent precision.

I worship them, I love

I laud in their presence

Eternally reminded of

Just how much their inspiration radiates;

Yet I cannot have any of them

To be my own.

Our binary dna once unravelled

Unravels the entire woven cloth

That is ours to share amongst ourselves.

But, when all is said and done, I return

Alone.

Punctured

Pop.

Deflation.

There,

I watch it seep out.

Moments earlier my pride

(fully intact)

Watched the hooded, benched figure do his morning ritual;

Waiting amidst the koru fumes of cancer

Where often he would

Reprimand me playfully for being so late,

But, early enough to catch the bus.

This morning, however, no cheerful smile, no purity in his eyes

Instead, a masked obsolescence perhaps stubbornly testing my patience.

A new program of thought; more silence, less gloating: more control.

Taken too far I thought.

The eye contact and a $5 note held out as our barrier

Carried its uncomfortable replays.

My ultramarine blue tights were dark wet,

My chequered grey heavy coat was cold; not stubbornly repelling moisture.

Likewise, my ultra marine blue umbrella sat as a Dadaist statement on my lap

The rain drops dripping down cold legs onto the bus floor;

A puddle of ego crawling shamefacedly away from its source.

Something was not right.

Why the $5 note? Why so awkward?

Why no talk, rather than less talk.

Had I taken this game too far?

Had I playfully reprimanded him once too many times

The lightness of his gloats, his talk

His lack of perception of me?

Had I after all my talk of context applying to personal attributes

Bypassed this oath to suit my own ego?

Had I refused to accept openly him climbing the ladder faster than me?

Refused to accept the incredible discomfort his family background brought me,

The incredible resilience he had as a consequence.

As the Wellington harbour washed past the abbreviated rain trickles on the window,

As I surveyed the grey domain with eyes washed anew with golden light

Pop. Deflated. There it was bright and clear.

The white elephant.

Devoid.

Halcyon

Calmed by the voice of my protagonist

Allen Ginsberg;

Reading so calmly

His creation

That for decades to come

Would let so many hang off

Every word he speaks....

A Supermarket in California

Allen Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman,
For I walked down the side streets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images,
I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! 

Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands!
Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

My eyes are musky peanut shells of tiredness

Ready to be gouged by the feverish elation of the night

That soon is to set eyes on me.

How I love thee world,

That you can cross my paths

With Ginsberg, Gibran and gibberish

Inherent in the banter of my youthful friends

Exposed in their inquisition for truth,

Viscerally child like in vulnerability ;

Walking upon shaky ground that has been tread so often

But,

Will be tread as pioneers.

I think of you M,

Who escaped my grasp so easily,

Without a Reminisce

A virtual adieu

Unsatisfied.   

Acumen

Stating the obvious for a moment of limelight. Its the false sense of wisdom that I referred to a few months ago. Can we read people? Maybe we can’t?

I watch quietly three confused faces:

That of the perpetrator, the victim and even the observer

What just happened?

My logic jumps to, trying to tear apart the facts, each laced innately with bias of what I think just happened...

This bias is anchoring me, as I read a piece of new knowledge. I want so heavily to project all my previous knowledge and experiences of religion upon this. I consciously kick myself as I gaze out at the early morning lit Wellington harbour.

Matiu Somes anchors the harbour. Bernini’s ‘Apollo and Daphne’ sculpture of the Italian Renaissance winks back. Until now, a sculpture was complete from front on; but with this one had to physically walk around it to experience Daphne turning into a tree before Apollo touches her.

Being on the bus, riding along the harbour’s circumference, I too take a conscious journey around the many faceted Matiu Somes. Effortlessly.

I witness physically:

‘A heavy numbness seizes her into bark

Feet so swift to root

Arm to branch, and hair to leaf

Woman to tree.

And in the end it's the difference of the spirit and the matter
It's the difference of the lover and the flyer
Don't it make you want to cry? 

It is nothing less, nothing less between the worldly and the want so,
All this breathing and the truth is in your last breath,
don't it make you want to cry?

So flying, flying,

And the way like a leaf grown,

Flying, cos the truth is in the soul we grow,

Flying.’
 

I return to the manifesto of my friend and my sunrise of bias and discomfort. I, like I see Matiu Somes island, like how I walk around Apollo and Daphne in awe; can too, move my feet and my mind around the beliefs of others.

My religious experiences, even though at no point have I been tormented by them, are separate from my observational and open minded self.

I have, I see, been stating the obvious for a moment of limelight. Is it a false sense of wisdom that I impart? Can I read myself; maybe you can, and I can’t?

But, I can move my feet and my mind around the perceptions of others.

Whetted

‘At once I knew I was not magnificent’ resonates, despite it being the defining line of lessons past. It is the prismatic light, the Milan Mrkusich realisations in ethereality. These abstractions draw me back to the calm, hallow-bright storm; before the piquing of every remarkable emotion one can conjure in the name of music.

Gulag Orkester does churn too.

It is the orgasm of music, that like the cursed Lady of Shallot , sees the helmut and the plume. It is the precision in

‘Out flew the web and floated wide

The mirror cracked from side to side

The curse is upon me, cried

The Lady of Shallott’

It is in the precision of knowing exactly when to lay your aching bones;

To dream of the ‘really nice’ words that flitted butterfly-like in your stomach.

x