Scot Herrigel

The world is a fantastically energized, writhing mass of fucking, eating, dying, and being born - with a most uncanny capacity for contemplation.

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The hunger, oh the hunger,

It animates all forms.

All life possesses hunger –

It drives the wild storm

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Of plant consuming Earth

Of beast consuming plant

Of beast consuming beast

Of Earth consuming all.

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The world’s a great abode

Where hungers interplay,

Where Wills compete with Wills

To taste another day.

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What is it that I am?

A world embodied soul,

A rider on a steed,

An organ of the whole

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Organical machine

Where bodies are effects

That carry in their cores

A fire that reflects

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That flame of primal source:

The furnace wherefrom life

Derives its motive force,

Propelling Darwin’s strife –

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I am a form of flesh

That wants from other flesh

To sate its appetite

Or else to intermesh

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In potent, ancient sex:

The garden where the fruit

Of naked ecstasy

Is magically induced.

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Thus I exist upon

The universal strains,

The currents of both sex

And hunger to remain.

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My body isn’t mine.

It is a brazen car;

It’s pulled by nature’s force:

The animals that are.

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And if I contemplate

And briefly find respite

In realms of airy forms,

In temporary flight,

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It soon must be snuffed out

By fleshes gravity

For even birds that fly

Require ground’s reprieve.

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The mighty hand of Earth

Is where all life returns:

It granted every birth

And permanently yearns.

Posted on May 10th, 2010 by admin
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There is a vase

Unerringly shaped

Continuity of glass

Balanced realization yet

A crack

A slender line of chaos

Is somehow written there -

The water

Drop by drop

Is lost -

And that makes all the difference

Posted on April 30th, 2010 by admin
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There is a brain, a mighty thing:

Humanity - collectively perceived -

Composed of dendrites, axons, synapses,

Receptive organs and deploying mouths

Or fingers metamorphosing

In constancy in order to sustain

The fusing current called

The Word –

So that one mind expels

Its content – a flashing spark

Possessed in sound – an impulse or

A mental nerve – that tries

To bridge a gap, complete

A circuit with a cell adapted to

Receive its energy: react

According to the means.

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Thus, mind transcends divisive matter,

The might of time and space

In ever fluctuating pulse

Of soul endowing soul with soul

Till selves collide and mix,

Impulsively united by

The electricity of language:

The subjects, verbs and objects of

The lingually stitched brain of mind.

Posted on April 26th, 2010 by admin
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There are far more bad actions in the world than there are bad people.

Posted on April 22nd, 2010 by admin
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Selflessness is always done with a self in mind.

Posted on April 22nd, 2010 by admin
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The mind as a reality, as a fact, is probably one of the most interesting things in the wide universe.

Posted on April 22nd, 2010 by admin
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What Exile from himself can flee?

To zones, though more and more remote,

Still, still pursues, where-e’er I be,

The blight of life – the demon Thought.

Lord Byron

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No matter where I go, I can’t

Relieve myself of raves and rants:

The dauntless howls of feral things

Whose being is a conscious sting.

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Perennial, the Night remains

And from its chambers comes the bane,

Just like the dragons from old tales

That would wreak havoc on the vales –

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Because there is in every soul

A Ghoulish past – a world Time stole –

A Raven perched at its dull gate

Endowed with adamantine Fate.

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Whoever wants beyond his glance

Forever will receive the lance

That pierces to the very core,

The heart, with cries of Nevermore.

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And yet the Gone is just one source

Of mentally engendered force:

The mind is like a world instilled

With floods and quakes and storms that kill.

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It builds itself walls that divide,

Some obstacles it can’t revise:

The forms that give the darkness life,

Applying to Hope’s light the knife.

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The shadows are the Vulture’s womb –

The emissaries of the tomb

That seek with claw and rancid beak

The mighty Ox – to make him weak.

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The more the limits are imposed

The more the darkness overgrows –

The more the wicked birds will cry

The more a soul begins to die.

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There is a zone where sea meets land

And there a Giant’s statue stands

Encompassed by both pride and shame:

In one hand gems, the other pains.

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Its feet reach down into the deep

Its bright crowned head’s as high as peaks

That are forever veiled in white:

Supernal and unearthly sight.

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Within the shade therefrom produced

The self resides and is induced

To find beside this ideal form

A vision of itself as worm.

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Another zone retains a tree

That drinks from the reviving stream.

It witnesses the changing sights

And cognizes Time’s sickle might.

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Yet this is not the only fear:

There’s locust swarms, uprooting steers

And famines that make streams subside:

The might of life is death entwined!

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Such is the burden born by thought,

The demons of Pandora’s box

Or else the apple that Eve ate:

The desert’s harshness is man’s Fate.

Posted on April 21st, 2010 by admin
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I am sitting outside right now, on a sturdy, green Adirondack chair looking out over a brief swath of marsh to the mighty Kennebec that is flowing regally and consistently toward the floor of the world: the collective basin of all waters. I can hear all manner of bird life vociferating in an intermeshed medley of wild sound. Why are they all speaking? Is it the spirit of spring evincing itself; the fecund energy of generation eliciting this supra-lingual cacophony of forest spirits conveying unheard, extra-human truths? The voices of the world are numerous. To think that I and these darting acrobats of the airs, these flying trumpeters and minstrels of rhythmic song, are both derivatives of the same essential reality denoted by that most general and mighty of words, Nature. To think that whatever force is compelling that song may simultaneously be compelling these thoughts, these words that come spilling out of me like chirping birds: linguistic syntheses of my soul.

They’ve dispersed now. All I hear is the sound of the wind passing gracefully through the marsh grass - like sprites whispering to each other - and a set of iron chimes inexplicably expelling the harmonious tones of metal lithely brushing against metal like an instrument that the wind itself delights in playing. My auditory consciousness enjoys all these transient manifestations of universal music. Perhaps it is because I recognize in them the sign of life, an intimation of the returning Spring, that blossom wreathed Dionysian Deity, whose heart is warmth, whose feet are generation and whose smile is uncanny bliss.

The mighty Kennebec, it continues to flow, excitedly, as if it knew of the impending change, as if it carried within itself the recalcitrant dolphins of Spring, as if that deity rode on his chariot of fire behind, indiscriminately bestowing, in thrown scatterings, the fruit of regeneration - because Spring knows no favoritism: it gives to the oak as well as the rose, to the air as well as the sea. It gives to the ear as well as the body, to the nose as well as the soul, so that I can’t help but feel to my inmost roots its tickling enticement. It brings forth all of its memories like spiritual flowers and I can smell old days in my soul, poignantly and melancholily enhanced by their relegation to a shady and ephemeral being in the fields of my rememberance. Even still, spring touches the heart. The cold impertinences of Winter are shirked off, allowing my being to intertwine with the warmth, with the soft soil and green grass, with the fragrance of nature being reborn and with the melodious locutions of the many traffickers of the sky, those winged corpuscules of painted and symmetrical grace that speak with a wisdom far beyond my ken.

The fact that all of these things converge around me, as a point, as a limited means of experience, something that is specified and is, is driven home now. I become Spring and Spring me so that nothing can take place in the world independent of me, so that I am like the oak, mysterious and alive, and this effusion of human ornaments, these human leaves and petals, this grammatically branched and guided blossoming of words, cannot be attributed to this identity but is rather like the mighty, inexorable river that flows without known reason.

How far, though, does this unity of identity between tree and I extend? I am conscious of myself, possess wants. The fact that want exists is striking, that nature somehow engendered the capacity to dream beyond itself, that I, as nature, can be dissatisfied with my lot – that the transient jewels of Spring are not enough. It is the anti-naturalism of my human identity, the result of being a thing that wills and can conceptualize its individuality and limitations: its being and its not being. This is the paradox of mind in nature. It is the solitude of being individuated in the extensive grandeur of the universe: the cursed I alone on the ocean that is beyond profundity.

Posted on April 14th, 2010 by admin
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Nature doesn’t know about Humbaba

Or moons as destinations

About heights of buildings

Or Championship rings.

These are human things:

Distinctly mortal and limited

Fruits of the tree of names,

Awareness of is and is not

And a belief that a self

Is only as good as its doings

Or that fame can transcend time.

Posted on April 13th, 2010 by admin
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The sky this morning was ablaze

With primordial orange -

An inexplicable hue almost as if

Night and day had converged and melted

In a transfiguration of the elements:

An effusion of the sharpest

And most pungent color.

My life became visible.

The fact that I had to die

Came crashing down upon me.

Posted on April 12th, 2010 by admin
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