I know – I am late with the Sunday Pomes & Words.
I shall offer no excuses. There is so much I could say, or diatribe about, but perhaps I shouldn’t.
It would spoil things.
Like today, apparently, it is ‘transgender awareness day’. I think they do these days deliberately, so people can assuage their guilt for one day then forget about it for the rest of the year. Like pseudo-Christians sinning all week then repenting on a Sunday. As if the Goddess would be fooled by such mendacity!
Instead, in the words of Lou Reed, I have made a very big decision.
So, welcome to Cats & Logic. I thought I would give you the very first, and the very last entry.
When I was younger, thirty years’ younger, that is, in my prime, when I was almost half-justified in thinking myself beautiful, I indulged in the kind of writing I now call ‘juvenilia’. I hadn’t read any of it for a long time, but now I revisit I find that actually, it’s not as bad as I thought it was. In fact, it’s rather good. It’s also like a kind of time capsule. Yes, of course it recalls bad memories from the time when I was this far away from deciding to leave the world, yet then I remember that I did not, as it happens, leave this world. I persisted. I endured.
During this period of my life, in my so-called prime – we’re talking some thirty years ago now – so between the years 1992-1994 especially, I went through a seriously feverish period of writing feverishly and virulently. Like, anything that came into my head I would just write it down. A little while later I looked back over all that stuff and somehow organised it into something approaching coherence.
One of the ironic aspects of all this is that I was writing what would now be called ‘flash fiction’ (or flash non-fiction, for at least half of it). Back then, the term ‘flash fiction’ didn’t even exist. No, don’t get me wrong here – I’m not trying to claim some kind of pioneer status with regards to the production of flash fiction. Yes, all this stuff what I wrote is far better than the shit that gets written these days, but that’s not a flash fiction thing, it’s just an aesthetic thing. Or maybe I would say that, wouldn’t I?
One of the reasons I was writing short little vignettes was because I had gotten really into Kafka, and he wrote this kind of stuff. It worked, of course. Each little gem said something. And that’s what I wanted to do.
The other fuel I was imbibing in those days was amphetamines. So bear that in mind too. That mainly began when I went up to university in North London and lived on Camden Road – as cool an address as you are ever likely to have. The flat, if it can even be called a flat, was a fucking shithole, although my friend and I were, at least, living next door to a short-lived band most of you will have never heard of called The God Machine (I swear they stole some of my songs, given I was practicing on the other side of their wall). But they were a damn good band.
Another thing I got into around that time was the Tarot. And it turned out I was really pretty good at it. As anyone who knows the Tarot knows, you will probably start out with the Rider Waite until you find the deck that belongs to you – or maybe the deck will find you. For me, this was the Cat People deck. Tarot readers will know what I’m talking about here when I say how much variety of feeling each deck has. I also have Crowley’s Thoth deck, for example, and Ishbel’s Egyptian Tarot, and both of those are entirely different from each other. Crowley’s are simply dark, unapologetic, brutally honest. Ishbel’s takes me away to an almost otherworldly place and time. Almost as if one no longer exists in this world.
But the Cat People deck, these are kind and lovely. Honest, of course, but they will not hurt. Anyhow, what I was getting round to saying is that the collection of little pieces of writing I put together I decided to call ‘Cats & Logic’. I must’ve realised at the time that I was being influenced by the Tarot but it only comes back to mind now I look back. One of the great things is that I wrote it all out by hand – you know, the way people used to do with something called paper and something called ink. Today, with this autocorrect function, you can’t do lower case ‘I’ – see, it corrected. It should’ve been ‘i’. In this collection of writings, then, I decided to differentiate between upper case I and lower case i. In the Cat People Tarot I tend to see the cats in the images as the soul, and the humans as the projected/incarnated mind, or expression of the soul in that particular lifetime. As above, so below and all that. Many religions and spiritual systems understand this concept. They may have different words or terms for it, but the principle is the same. The Ancient Egyptians, for example, well, if I recall correctly they had five different parts of the self, not all of which would survive mortal death.
In my philosophy, the I – the soul, godhead, archetype, whatever word you use, because it is an eye that cannot see itself, incarnates into a succession of lifetimes, in each of which it manifests as a ‘mind’ – my lower case ‘i’ – and learns and evolves in each time. It can turn its gaze around and look back at itself, understand itself, do whatever it must do and then reintegrate at the end of things. Such is the nature of spiritual evolution.
Such, in fact, is the reason for existence of reality itself. Time, it is, which splits up the Centre Point into infinity. It looks back at itself, and becomes.
Well, it makes sense to me, anyhow.
So I wasn’t, really, genuinely, honestly, being pretentious in all this.
I don’t do my Tarot as much as I used to do or perhaps should do. And maybe I could offer some readings to my paid subscribers, if I ever get any. Now there’s a thought – let me know what you think about that idea in the comments. I am, as it happens, really rather good at it. I earned a significant number of drinks at the bar at the university doing Tarot. Those were the days – days that seem so alien now as to be a different world entirely.
Unrecognisable, actually.
Anyway – my decision. Given I now think all this Juvenilia is really quite better than I remembered it being, I thought I would finally bring it out into the world. This first volume of Juvenilia, Cats & Logic, is maybe some forty thousand words worth of stuff. I’ve got at least three more where that came from. Given it was written in the old-fashioned way, pen and paper that is, it will take me some time to type it up. But I shall endeavour. I shall persist. And I shall endure.
And so I am minded to present you with a few initial selections, and then make the rest of it paid-subscriber only. Well, we shall see how it goes and it will, naturally, depend on what people think about it. Again, let me know in the comments.
It is, ironically, Easter Sunday today, and one of the early pieces in the collection is, honestly, called ‘A Resurrection’. I thought of posting that one, but then I reconsidered. Although it would indeed be apt, I thought no, let’s be non-conformist, and maybe do it next week.
To commence, then, I thought I would give you the very first and the very last little piece of writing from that first collection. You will notice in the first piece how there is a difference between those upper and lower case eyes. This first story, on revisitation, is like the knowledge of the soul’s existence being presented, or returned, to the mind. Think of the human boy in the story as the Fool. Then throughout the rest of the collection that ‘i’ ventures through life in all its turbulence and then, finally, understands what it really wants before it returns to itself again, for a little respite, before the evolutionary stream continues.
There’s a kind of Paschat logic there too, I guess.
But that’s for another time. I’ll stop burbling on again now, and just let you inside.
I have no doubt you are more than capable of making up your own minds.
See you next week and may the Goddess bless you well…
i don’t know!
One afternoon, as i was taking a stroll down the street, i passed a small boy, no more than ten years old, clutching a beautiful Burman cat to his breast. The cat looked confused, as all Burmans do, confused in curiosity, yet happy to remain that way. “Where are you going with that beautiful creature?” i asked. “I don’t know,” came the aristocratic reply. Now i was confused. “You must know where you’re going!” i furthered, “it’s not every day a small boy walks down the street clutching a Burman cat to his breast.” “I swear, I have no idea where we’re going,” came the unequivocal answer. Well, with that i didn’t really know what to think, so i decided to accompany them to their mysterious destination. We soon came to a tall Edwardian house, where we opened the gate and approached the door. From inside i heard the most beautiful piano playing. And as i gazed so deep into the Burman’s beautiful marble eyes, so red and blue and young, i swear i thought that surely this must be heaven. “Is this our destination?” i asked. “I don’t know,” came the familiar reply. The door opened and a strangely beautiful young man, dressed all in black, thanked the boy and took his cat into his arms. The boy left. “Where did you find such a beautiful creature?” i asked. “I don’t know,” was the reply, as familiar as ever. “There’s no point in asking him anything,” said the young man, “he doesn’t know.” I left, and walked away in even more confusion than before. “Miaow,” i miaowed. And as i walked away, i swear i heard that familiar Burman voice saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
A single wish
“What do gods want?” she said?
…to run away, in the darkest coldest winter, to be in a desolate castle far away from the world high amongst desolate mountains, to run away and be alone, to play an old piano in the dark with a white cat perched on the piano and listening intently with glistening eyes as i play it slow and deep, deep and slow … to close my eyes and see and hear the sounds, to be alone and away from the world, to run away and be on my own, in the darkest coldest winter, in a castle somewhere … to run away, and be alone … to leave all these pictures and memories and the world behind … Peace, and Quiet, and Rest, and to want for nothing more … to run away, and be alone … to be alone, again … to be alone.
That is what i want.
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