Le Néant:

....... have you heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning
hours, ran to the market place and cried incessantly:     'I am looking for God!
I am looking for God!'   -     As many of those who did not believe in God were
standing together there he excited considerable laughter.  Have you lost him
then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another, or is he hiding?
Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? - thus they shouted
and laughed.  The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his
glances.  'Where has God gone? he cried. 'I shall tell you.  We have killed him -
you and I.  We are all his murderers.'  But how have we done this?  How were
we able to drink up the sea?  Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire
horizon?  What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun?
Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns?
Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?
Is there any up or down? Right or left? Are we not straying as through infinite
nothing?  Do we not feel the breathe of empty space?  Has it not become colder?
Is more and more night not coming on all the time?  Must not lanterns be lit in
the morning?    Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers
who are burying God?  Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition -
gods too decompose.  God is dead. God remains dead.
And we have killed him. [Nietzsche.]

Soundless world, cold and sunless
who has led us here heavy of heart?
Like pilgrims
We walk the long dusty road to a
                           former paradise

The five rungs are twisted now,
                           mere wreckage
garnished by bodies
rotting carcasses
once the abode of souls.

Our footsteps haunt a narrow alleyway
then here, at the Ruined Centre
we swing upon a diabolic scene
It bursts all heady on the senses -
eyes, ears, nose and skin ...
Oh Mercy! The Rotting God!
Now every poison thought and bitter wish
begins to swell and sing inside our skin
soon the Spleen shall rupture
we shall see dark swarms of seeding boredom.

There is nothing here for man or beast, La Neante,
just the acrid stench of a long dead
                           civilisation,
And each corpse, once a cell of God
now a feast for the Anima Mundi
here at least nature has a victory of sorts.

And manakins, strange stuffed clowns
                           of painted cloth
are propped about the reeking God
and insects big as rats, scuttle too and fro
all ghastly shiny black.
No doubt they ply a healthy trade.
Oh Mercy! Set the sun to perish!
Bring down the Night!
A man can only bear so much sorrow.

Mr. Newton’s Universe:

The Universe
once crystal spheres,
once musical in substance
harmonic in effect
once composed,
of matter and desire
once unmoving sacrality

now inanimate matter,
extended form,
spinning to infinity ...
and we mere bodies,
mere solids of terrestrial chaos

All mystery divorced from blood and bone
The gods withdraw,
the faeries lumber home,
and dragons, speared from the sky.

Nothing truly lives
In Mr. Newton’s Universe.

Newtonian Physics:

‘Whatever draws or presses another is as much drawn or pressed by that other. If you press a stone with your finger, the finger is as much pressed by the stone.’ Newton.

- I can’t quite believe
gravity is more than physical
               you see,
heaviness, lightness
what are these to me?

if not certain seasons of the soul.

The Method :

The chicken is dead Mr Bacon
Why preserve its misery?

No matter,
the method rumbles on,
a juggernaut, a bulldozer
a panzer tank, a transport plane
the method rumbles on.

Unborn angels weep
the flat earth bleeds
but the method rumbles on
Hiroshima, Nagasaki
the method flattens all possibilities
Dachau, Auschwitz,
the method smothers all rebellion.

The chicken is dead Mr. Bacon
why preserve its misery?

Commentary:

These poems come from my book 'Facing the Demon of Noontide'. Close to thirty pieces from that work have already been published in various magazines and e-zines around the world. I should say that the collection is a kind of meditation on the forces that restrain the life instinct (the elan vitale). It represents my attempt to work through the personal and social manifestations of certain 'postmodern maladies of the subject'. In this sense I use poetry cathartically and see it almost in an alchemical sense - the 'lead' of the soul, the repressed traumas and buried possibilities are to be converted into the 'gold' of greater awareness and personal contentment.

In trying to come to terms with the postmodern maladies of the subject (connected to what culture critics call 'The Fragmentation of the Subject') I found myself drawn further and further back in history, back to the 'spleen' described by Baudelaire in 'The Flowers of Evil' and 'Paris Spleen', back to the black melancholy described by the 18th century English psychiatrist Dr. George Cheyne in 'The English Malady' (1733), back to the Desert Fathers of Christendom and their description of 'the Noontide Demon' of 'acedia or tristitia' - that is to say debilitating sadness, boredom, depression. I realised that acedia was but a Christian version of what the Romans had called taedium vitae - 'boredom with life'. In short, it began to dawn on me that terms like chronic ennui, alienation, estrangement, anomie, degeneration, neurosis etc. were modern versions of a very ancient malady. Worse that what is today widespread was up until the 18th century a rare phenomenon.

The poems published here represent a very important chapter in my attempts to come to terms with the darker side of 'secularism'. In this sense I am revisiting the later Enlightenment and early Romantic response to the 'maladies of the subject' then termed melancholy, the spleen and, for the French, chronic ennui. I am also looking at the mindset of the scientific method through the eyes of a soul doctor (which every poet is). What does the scientific view of the world mean to subjectivity? The poems represent a poetic critique of the scientific method, but also of the processes of 'disenchantment' - bureaucratisation, urbanisation, mechanisation etc etc. i.e. the processes of modernity itself. And I am viewing this method retrospectively from the perspective of a late twentieth century poet viewing the tragedies of the twentieth century - the mechanised slaughter of two world wars, the invention of hideous weapons of mass destruction, our parasitic attitude toward the natural environment. In other words I dare to see the scientific method as an aspect of what Freudians call the 'death instinct'. The poems represent a meditation on worldwide processes of disenchantment and demythologisation, they deal with what Morris Berman calls 'the progressive retreat of soul from matter'. As a footnote, there is a legend that Bacon, one of the inventors of the scientific method, died from pneumonia after using it to invent techniques associated with the preservation of meat. He stuffed the interiors of dead chickens with snow and measured their rate of decay.