This is a collection of fragments excerpted from four books of epic verse written over many years. The working title of the project was 'In the New Millenium'.
The illustrations - of dubious artistic merit, to be sure - were produced to supplement the verse. The art's viability beyond an online forum like this blog is tenuous, at best.
Are we not the closest of companions, dear muse?
Set loose my pen and I will share your news.
Lead me to languages
which will have the words I need to speak.
An invocation,
To the muse, electrical muse, muse of my industry, tech muse;
To the muse, religious muse, muse of my devotion, god muse;
To the muse, lovers' muse, muse of my passion, heart muse;
To the muse, poets' muse, muse of my mythos, eternal muse;
Put at my disposal all the devices of imagination.
The history of humanity is the history of consciousness.
And though our origins are shrouded by a veil of ignorance,
It is the imagination of poets which bring life to the abstractions of evolution,
Discerning meaning where fleshy eyes perceive only chaos
All that is,
Was once only a dream.
Was once only a dream.
A vision brought from nothing,
A quantum event unravelling history,
Making time + ages + millennia + aeons,
Stretching out that moment to a span of years,
Unreckoned by humankind.
Yes, all that is was once only a dream.
The vision that is spoken of by the prophets and poets,
By the magicians and myth-makers of old,
Resides within everyone.
In this way, the history of the whole universe
Is one human lifetime,
The world is created again when a child is born.
(When they ask you,“When was the universe made?”
Say to them,“The moment you were born.”)
And this vision is a providential thing,
For I have no method or science besides the intuition of this thing,
Which could extract such knowing from the Soul of the World,
The Animus Mundi,
That all humanity bears living testimony,
To the eternal vision,
But still humanity sleeps, and does not know it.
In a state of exalted perception,
Wherein the occulted things of reality
Are brought into the light,
I was shown to the origin of this universe.
Mark me, seekers of truth and inspiration:
Ours is a cosmos born within the corpus of an even more ancient cosmos.
It is the nature of all material,
To waste naught of itself,
But to conserve and create anew from that which is at an end.
So it was that from this most ancient cosmos,
A single egg was left finally,
As the sum remaining total and end result of a great celestial enterprise.
A primeval atom, a singularity,
The seed from which all creation would spring.
Let me take you then, to the place that is not a place,
Where densities become infinite,
Where scientific laws break down.
Gaia is the emanation of the World Soul,
And through Gaia, the purposes of the Animus Mundi
are made plain by the devices of evolution.
Gaia dreams,
And all creation sleeps,
Reinventing itself timelessly,
In accordance with the eternal vision.
The Animus Mundi animates Gaia,
And directs the purposes of the world,
Though it knows not why,
Nor what will come of these endeavours;
Perceiving the eternal vision,
Only as a blind man with a key,
Knows the weight and texture of the instrument,
And not the door it opens.
For innumerable millennia,
Gaia labours, inspired by the World Soul,
Nurturing colonies of bacteria,
And organizing complex proteins,
Which in the perception of the Ancients
Seem to be the work of gods and titan and spirits.
Now It is said that the origin of life is to be found
In some pre-Cambrian ooze.
And that the fiery hell feared by some
Is a distant recollection of the world
As it was when protozoa merged and differentiated
In puddles of tepid water.
With equal parts of protein and light,
An offspring was conceived,
Various bacterium and one-celled algae,
Sponges, plants and finally invertebrate trilobites.
But through the eye of imagination,
Which witnesses the unfolding of the vision,
I hear a piece of music, growing in complexity,
Developing themes purposefully,
Moving matter as the instrument of its song,
Conducted by the World Soul,
Growing in ambition until I am with dinosaurs,
The ground shakes with the thunder of their coming;
A grand crescendo is reached,
Before the denouement.
Then, without warning, the symphony is silenced,
And almost all life on the planet becomes extinct.
It is replete throughout the chronologies and nebulous histories
Of this planet that the World Soul has suffered,
And that this suffering has served some greater purpose.
The lands of the Earth erupt in a waking rage,
Raised from timeless slumber,
By celestial titans and stars from heaven,
Falling as asteroids, promoting the deaths of ten thousand species.
But finally nature sleeps;
The giant Gaia upon which all the human enterprise rests
She sleeps for many thousands of years.
At times, she is restless, and there is a cull.
At times, she is restful and civilized growth follows.
At the heart of Gaia is what the Philosopher called
The Animus Mundi,
The World Soul we have spoken of already,
Within which the purpose of all things
Is to be fulfilled.
I have set myself now on the rock:
Only science, reborn and redeemed
Bears testimony to the genius of our kind:
The animal who realized what it was....
What strange creatures humans are,
With one hand, they take life,
And with the other, they try to save it.
Of humans, that most peculiar device of Gaia,
This much can be said: They are the most active
And aware agents of nature,
Yet they have rebelled against the Earth.
Seeking to subdue and control that which has been
Set in motion by the Eternals,
And leaving naught but waste in their wake.
Still Gaia loves them and accepts them to her bosom,
When they die and their bodies are burned,
Or put into the ground to return to her.
In this way, but not only in this way,
Humans cannot escape their fates,
They are tied to the Earth,
And it is tied to them;
All grand political reckoning
is associated with earthquake spasms, tidal waters,
terrible cyclones, tornadoes and rains that do not end.
In those dark years which saw the demise of Imperial Rome,
And the sundering of that empire into a quarrelling pair
Of estranged lovers,
Gaia dreamt again the hope of all humankind.
To the north of pious Byzantium,
On the shores of Albion walked a company of men
In whom Jesus and his disciples lived again.
While all around invaders lay siege to that fair land,
And all civilized learning in Europe lay hidden in darkness,
King Arthur and his mighty companions, Lancelet and Gwaine,
Held aloft a light,
That all good people of conscience would rise up,
Reconciling their beliefs with each other,
Making peace in the name of the Christ,
And Gaia, who they called goddess,
And overcoming such baseness in humankind
That would seek to achieve the end of all things.
Counselled by the wise and venerable Taliesin,
And guided in the ways of Gaia by his sister-lover Morgaine,
In whom the goddess found both tender and terrible expression.
Arthur consolidated his fractured political state,
Uniting the people of all houses under a common banner.
And for a short time, it was as if Atlantis had risen again,
And constructed the towers of Camelot as a symbol of its return.
But alas, the actions of the World Soul are often inscrutable.
Arthur had been married to his land in an age old ceremony,
So that his fate and the fate of the countryside were bound up in one another.
It is said that he met his end in battle,
Yet poets and bards say that he is only sleeping,
And that he will remain so until the end of time
As the member cells in our bodies form communities of muscle,
blood and bone and organize themselves to benefit the whole,
So too are we members in a larger body,
Still Invisible to the corporeal eye,
but laid out along a great galactic plane,
in the eternal vision,
which is in the eye of imagination.
Know that there has been no empire of man upon the Earth,
More alike to Atlantis in times immemorial,
Than America in this new millennium.
The science, idealism, and social tension,
Trade and warring in all districts of the globe.
Yet much material good done and great healing as well.
I have heard that the messiah would come from the west,
And now I know the meaning of the statement,
For even now, as in history of Atlantis,
There are those who advocate the eternal values,
And with evolved views and methods, set out to change the World,
For the good of all.
Still Rome had a gentler hand in diplomacy,
Than Atlantis or America,
And Greece, acknowledged as the cradle of western civilization,
Was seeded in times more ancient than the days of fair Atlantis,
And the two states found themselves forever at odds,
Until Atlantis
Was wiped from the Earth by the salt water waves
Of the World Sea.
And America, that most precocious democracy,
Born of slavery, blood and revolution, that republic was formed
As all mortal beings are, brought into the world,
The mother’s body acts and revolts,
And aches to allow the child's passage,
So Europe, pregnant with an ancient seed of Greece,
Conceptualizes America,
A nation born(e) by Africa's children
To be gentle and brazen, mighty and merciful;
A nation born(e) by Africa's children
To be gentle and brazen, mighty and merciful;
That the prophet's vision be fulfilled,
And the lion lie down with the lamb.
I have seen through the eye of imagination
And there are two Jerusalems;
One a city in the corporal state of Israel,
Beloved and blessed a thousand times more than cursed,
But split by politics and religion, degraded.
The other is the Eternal Jerusalem,
The Invisible abode of spirit,
Which travels around and above the Earth,
Never at rest and set upon a great rock,
Made to move by a technology or magick
Humans do not yet know,
Travelling in perpetual motion over all the provinces
Travelling in perpetual motion over all the provinces
And districts of the World.
It is there that the Eternals reside,
That is what I heard from my Guide.
The enormous Gaia turned uneasily in her Sleep,
And 250,000 souls were lost to this World.
The fissure at the sea bottom,
A rupture deep within the Animus Mundi,
Loosed bounded elementals upon the lands of Asia,
Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Thailand and even Africa!
Hear the terrible wail of the living and of the sorrow of survival.
Gaia groans, still unconscious,
This nightmare that has been long conceived,
In the occult places of the Animus Mundi,
It takes a terrible form: destructive Kali,
And lays waste the shores of wide ranging lands and districts,
Affecting all people alike.
Kali smiles and there is a fire in the belly
Of jolly Bacchus, waiting for the harvest;
Last year's wine is almost gone...
