THE ARGUMENT

An itinerant treads through the fields in London, Wales and England, picking through the debris of a culture war, heading back home to the north. They record the thoughts of objects and see the others talking and gesturing, haunted by visions and dreams of the past and future. The field repeats, each time slightly differently. In each field a different assemblage – maybe a castle, or a festival, or a bird

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Clasp the grass in your hands at this late hour of rebirth – as we sweat, we who know too much, and too quickly – faded chromium packets waft in the breeze over the field, like silvered afterimages

Since we reinforce our being through rooms of tiny hands reaching towards fluorescent lights – we teach the performance of us – when offloaded we stutter, flake, lost in proportion to that loss

Hear the plane unzip evening skies – culture can harden to crystal where once it was organic – subtilise your panic

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We can cover ourselves in dirt, with hustle and bustle, to avoid the abyss (our becoming-calcite) – but a small black cat wants to sleep on our chest, while it purrs, sounding the hollow

If we give up moral valence – just do what we need and let life cast light to describe our moving – as a cold and beautiful vale of sunlight, showing chaos scattered across a tiled floor – ignoring the bones in the drawer

But didn’t we once have grace? Our thought could bestow it again – we can’t go wrong, if we do wrong… this holy thought-life frees us

*

Excuse me while I disconnect – I tried hard to stick meaning to the story – we played Baldur’s Gate, Heroes of Norrath – so much time spent thusly and ending in dark discord

Regimes of meaning collide as Dostoevski and Nietzsche throw away their controllers and turn off the console – I join this laughing and dancing – I lie in the field and dream of Gameboys

A slight frown accompanies the new life, a memory of frowns – and other frowns of them – cathode ray tubes send dark futures

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If god was real, how could you sleep with all that evil osmosed in – how terrifying the real god, who knows just how everything is – Chichen Itza and Sedlec within

Bad enough being a child learning to have a face learning to have eyelids constantly weigh on your eyes – learning the throat’s smallness – air runs through with a low whistle – these noises that will haunt you – ghost of a heartbeat – learning the feet’s hotness, the pain of not seeing – the slow function of tear-ducts

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This is no reproach – but seeing is useless to us and hearing, we hear nothing – our long lives run paths of confusion, we know nothing of sun facing houses – we know no carpentry, and dwell underground in sunless caves

We are uncertain about spring, summer, etcetera, fruits, blooms – our every act, without purpose – but we see the stars rise and set – have cursive memories, and write blossoms of talk and sigaldry

To work is so hard for our bodies, and too dear – such are our skills and devices

*

In the field (a temple) – a lichen-covered seat, where god’s heart in the dry garden hangs fast – like nowhere else on earth – hear that fluid-rush and slapping of tissues compressing. Thuds startle the black ducks – it lies submerged in the hot lake, seething – the massive, beating heart of god and satan’s small and proud heart lies beached on its pulsing fly-island, cracking and splitting in the sun

All this blood in the water, flesh of the red clouds this fine evening – I can hear a battle from here – but I like this fading rhythm more

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Animals can see each moment coming from a mile away, but find it hard to change the future, even knowing the time and place of their death – be it in a small hot deli at a late breakfast, or elsewhere

Our failure, our sin: that we lost this shining ability – this fissure allows us our waste

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Enjoying yourself takes practice and is no waste – to sit on the beach and drink – to not allow the idea to overlay the drinking of it – learning to relax is as hard as learning to work or fight

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This may surprise you, my dearest, but when we get down to bedrock no two things are the same – this dagger I see before me and this other dagger, also are not the same – no two males are the same, nor females, nor organs, nor others

The lit secret is: change an object’s place and you change its identity – difference is real – these are the universe ontics – there is nothing all objects under one name share – name is just or mostly air blown in historic relations

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There are reasons why we suffer – don’t forget, when we think well we know how to worry – if we feel lonely that’s because we are – and our beds are empty – I hate that every morning I must face the evil alone, you said – and I could not speak, and my eyes – well, I could not see to see – this fluorescent tube of light, its heart, your wet hair slick in the darkness

May the golden meme come to our aid, between sheets of crisp paper with elegant setting and type, and kelmscott hedgings and gild – to lower beauty’s latency

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In every time and every place there are those who are for, and those against – forming two gnarling camps whose scars soon seem scratched mirrors of the other

Yes, purple tents (other fabrics seem tatty and used) – this side of the brook’s curve whose opposing banks throng with beige, and other colours leech til the sandbank’s wagtail sees blood running through the water’s blue reflections – this paling image is a gravity of minds – and we who live at escape velocity run risks, talk quietly of justice

I sit, on the achieved knoll’s soil, twirling a dented halberk’s tin window, looking deep and in

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Life spiraled out of control when we figured everything we do lasts forever – once done, never taken back – rests in infinity’s ledgers – this scratched tally on the dull walls of existence – on the silicon chip of being there are strings for all things, all sins yet sometimes registry entries are lost in the blue screens of time

I stand, and survey the battlefield – I stand, on hot dirt’s cracking skin

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The peasantry can’t afford such daring gambles – you need land for that, need capital and ours is haunted by speculation

I came to this field from a home where a crowd of parents sat grumbling – in their seat belts, reading papers, never winding down the window further than an inch, then only to gaze for a moment at the weary leaves – dry, and fallen short of season – I cannot speak as they grow tired and tie their tongues around disgust – ardent noises startle the old

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A grassy place without a name – I thought I knew where I was but now I lie wounded in this all this crap – whose sodding side was I on?

Time has passed now as the grass is soft and damp on my cheek, my tired fingertips – I have arrived at a wordless place – I see bodies here lack organs; that one has lost its name, its voices; this has lost its mind, its heartbeat

I have lost, but am alive – a beginning – call me Zarathustra – something like that – a tethered firework

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Each human’s brain is a lifetime’s work of art – watch it there dancing its body – way to go, you dense mass of infinites, connectomes, unboundaries, uncatchable, describable!

It’s just a shame we’re lost in space – we know exact co-ordinates – all different kinds of masses and still we’re lost in space – our magnesium hearts burn bright, then burn us out, we wobble free, a husk of carbons and burned lumps – bodies laid out after battles – fallen bodies, fallen standards, and blank eyes, far stars, something more

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Remember it ye brash truth-seers, ye comforted afore a screen, thine children shoring thee, that some may stand hopelessnesses, tho it lies beyond the reach of others – and call this not dalliance, nor flirting with the real but the sore need of care

Adam and Eve were too innocent not knowing what they had, nor that they would lose nor what it was to lose – forgive us that, forgive them unknowing – what only knowing could bring – the baggage of knowing, value – yet even in the garden of Eden they should have demanded more

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Milady, what if this is it? – what if things never get worse, fall of eternal sized proportions – what if our burden is to feel the battles of immanency forever?

I heard a story once about a sailor trapped in a great maelstrom, hung halfway up, halfway down it in a broken barrel – look up and he would see dense-clouds and squall – down, the reality gap black of the rumbling whirl – but never did he move – the poor cur – thus we win individual battles but never win the war, never

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I can’t cope with this immense and quiet sorrow which drapes itself on my back when I drive the car – when I use a new washing liquid, when I turn on lights and I must ask what all this has to do with god, or the real way of things now

These moth-black cows here around us, they could leave these fields if they so desired, but I know so much I can’t get out – even if I fly, Noah’s crow into the storm filled stratus, I know tomorrow brings battles – I know I can’t run from such time or time as such – so I slide this whetstone along my blade and hope

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Mountains, hills, everything towered will raze with time to a soft flat with a deep skin of water – end in shallows, given time enough – as a particular yew palls with a virus pulled from other regimes of beings – gone are the days of this and thatness, now a flatness, now a flatness – where sand raises up and subsides under paltry and pallid waves – those were the days, when you could speak and your real voice would say something

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Of course the hard problem applies to you too – your lips move, but I can’t hear what you’re saying – I find nothing like comfort in this, sheathe your swords – get them away from me – get out

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The children of intelligence have long made war ignoble with their sharpeners and hot tools, their horse-shoe hooves and armoury so let’s go back to the days of rocks and bash each other over the head for bones

Of the immense human song through warm Savannah spines and cuticles, of long running to catch prey, with a greater endurance – those days were purer, no? – now watch the unnatural cut lop off zones of the cultural body – your mind will feel the pain but not your tongue, if you are struck down here on this field of heather

They can’t reach the connectome of your words to harm it – it’s a pain, so heft your pike and mount your tuft – we are here to protect the tongue on its fleshy seat, the golden brain – the tongue being history’s web – the path of words imbibed, and threatened by being disowned, it can’t be avoided – you are reading it you are thinking through it and all thoughts and makings seep with it (it’s god) – you just have to prospect

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For a breath’s short moment, quiet streetlights dwell in misty drizzle, and quiet reigns in general – the humidity from showers and clouds’ unwieldy systems – on a night where we stand looking from porch-dark into the rain’s slip and weave on parked windscreens and bins – the bedraggled cat shouts and calls its name or thinks it does, tail low and dripping – the sun warmed concrete matured now over these longest days, with water’s help, fills air’s odours – the tempo looms to a stop

*

I walked into the fog, slow in, slowing as I went, and saw statues of the ancient greek sort, colours lost and missing limbs, dicks, noses, place – in the fog, placed carefully and the mud and the grass lapped at them – the occasional strobe light pass hit the black grass, and them, watching – sometimes eyeless. Working crafters built you, and we don’t always see why, though your blind eyes have our horror – I thought – a winged and headless angel sailed past on a lost ship – there were bodies there too, my friends, allies, countryones, laid out, dug – so lost, my tears, I hid trench deep

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My ambitions are in this rock – they are slipped between vellum sheets – they are in this armour, this sword, this child – there is a hard lesson to learn as we live life without the other side of thinking, hope – we need the cultus to allow us ambitions – they can’t help but express themselves through it like warm cling-film expresses a cold face pushed into it – pencil, poised to undercut the sword, falls, its shadow passes the blue, white, green, of a summer day in silence

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The field held sun-lovers on its packed dirt, plying the dry grass, mindless, mindful, and the thuds and swervings of music would bless it, move it if you looked with small enough eyes – eyes dry with pollen and wind, hair on bare stomachs, leaves tesselating shadows over those reading books, screens absorbing the world’s performance, and the delicate whisper of natures engines, lesser engines – the sky would wipe minds with trails

Beekeepers watched, and bees watched, exhausted from their groundings – I lean and loaf at my ease, and pull the grass blade out, and wield it

*

Does everything look right today? The same as yesterday? The same tribal dance leaping through a field of tractors and red harvesters – the same dry-wall work crumbling out, and yet here we are with silent armies, stationed at their foot-zones – skulls clacking and teeth well counted as the gull-harpies hawk over depositing digested scraps – we wait with voices as they were, exactly as they were – yet all this hubbub, all this bright, angered chatter always breaks out

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I hear On the Nature of Daylight and everything in the world protests against stupidity

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A still point slips on the sea’s surface – love songs and songs of love – warm wine, and the beauty of those whose skin reddens, or deepens in the sun – stalls serve sweetness of food from all of life’s zones – from the river, from the field crust, from the crust of other long days in other fields – and the salt crust of hot bodies while sleeping mats grow silent, back under canvas, as the milk goes off in the warm bios

Here water is the lost essence as grass grows trampled under boots which have their manifold causes in wombs, heartbeats, and rhythms, and there on high, the tall crag peak of Darren

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I am the seed of a English Republic – there are so many things I want but I can achieve none of them, not only because of the crown (heavy on the riverbed lies the leg chained to the crown) but the structure of desire just isn’t what it used to be – all these soft linen suits walking across the street, no-one in them – all those faint anthems and old hymns which are hard to hear as more than cries of pain – or theme tunes – I’m not a bad person

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A bed in the darkening days and faint bodily pains – and wrongs shot into the brain like stone gaps in an ancient castle, where bombs have blown new holes

Can I be born? Just thirty years from now? – and know whether the worry was worth it? – in the shop today I found it – an almanac which glowed when touched and it read you – unexpected – since of course it’s normally the other way round – or at least we once thought so – it spewed out a series of tones, and this crystalline conception of music undid my knots – I sighed and saw the things I needed

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This field is my carpet – my feet grasp the soft blades like late morning lovers grasp each other – perfect – the thoughts are dulled by softnesses – I have hurt so many people, I have been the moment of deep decision on the quiet road – I have tattoos I never chose – but all of this could fly skyward towards the sun’s violent love – feel the warm beam of an autumn day with the radiators on just cut into us as we melt like butter in a microwave – before we know it, we have gone into the warmness, as things rage on

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In the inn on the town square, talk falls through from the bar – in a charred pub room – leaving the deer skulls in their mounts, we discuss the crimes of our lords, inexplicable foreign wars – then get onto last things – the meals we would eat at last times – the meals we were made out of – fish and chips and tea scald and beer, ingredients without a history – we talk of Anne Lister’s cipher and laugh and admire the odd dog – across the way the sun is setting behind the ruined castle – we consider leaping the low wall – the sky glows and flows like milk in tea

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See where there is to get to: a natural building, with old fittings – moments of loud, moments of soft quiet, just when it felt needed – a cafetière drunk slowly and music crackling with needless noise, and popping – care for the day, care for the one who fainted, or had panic attacks in the night – smiles for the most part, and odd frowns, and tears building faint and watery ramparts in the eyes – and warm skin – we impress each dark hair’s line into this tabula rasa – blank features echo irises filled with love – such things we can achieve

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Late last night, I went out across the low mist of the field to sleep in a bare bed, with an old mattress – I met my friend, with whom I lay – she asked me what I wanted to – I said nothing but drew my eyes close to hers and felt her faint lips and a breath infused with life, a warm life, in ancient concepts – I drew back and sat on the side – the potentials of the world grew so vast that, crushed, I could not move – her hand on my back was welcome – it was not what it should have been – a morning sun dispersing damp where cold dew drops leave the bent grass

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