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The Genius Loci is the ruling theme of my Magnum Opus, as yet unpublished and still ongoing on Poetic Iconology & The Goddess of Divine Being. Here is one of the chapters on 'A Vision of the Spiral Castle'
Only those will ask leave of thee who do not believe in Allah and the
Last Day and whose doubtful hearts cause them to waver.
(The Holy Quran. Al Toba [The Repentance]. 45. Translated with
Brief Explanatory notes by Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad -
Khalifatul Masih IV. The Bath Press, 1997).
It is He who hath raised from amongst the illiterates a Messenger who
recites unto them His Signs and purifies them and teaches them the
Book and wisdom, though before this they had been in manifest error.
And shalt raise him amongst others who have not yet joined
them. He is the Mighty the Wise.
That is Allah's grace which He bestows on whomsoever He pleases.
And Allah is the Master of immense grace
(The Holy Quran. Al Jummah [The Friday Service]. 3 - 5.
Translated with Brief Explanatory notes by Hazrat Mirza Tahir
Ahmad - Khalifatul Masih IV. The Bath Press, 1997).
By the star when it falls.
Your companion has neither erred nor has he gone astray.
He does not speak out of his own desire.
It is pure revelation sent to him.
Taught him by the one with mighty powers.
Of Great Might. Who then settled upon His
throne.
When He was at the loftiest Horizon.
Who came down when he drew nearer.
So that it became one chord to 2 bows or closer
still.
Then He revealed to His servant that which He revealed.
The heart of the Prophet lied not regarding what it
saw.
Wilt thou then dispute with him about what he saw?
And he experienced Him a second time.
Near the farthest lote-tree.
Close to the Great Good Place.
When it was covered by a
covering.
His eye deviated not nor wandered.
Surely he witnessed the greatest of the Signs of his
Lord.
(The Holy Quran. Al Najm [The Star]. 2 - 19. Translated with
Brief Explanatory notes by Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad -
Khalifatul Masih IV. The Bath Press, 1997).
Poets' real biographies are like those of birds their real data are
in the way they sound. A poet's biography is in his vowels and
sibilants, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the
story they tell.
(Less Than One. Joseph Brodsky. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1986).
An aunt of Seamus Heaney's once planted a chestnut in a jam jar. When it began to grow she planted the jar under a hedge in front of her house. As he grew Heaney began to identify with the tree because everyone emphasised the fact that it had been planted in the year of his birth. It had grown up with him. And as the tree grew, it began to symbolise, for Heaney, his aunt's affection for him.
All the trees surrounding the house were chopped down in the early
1950s by the new occupants when his aunt moved away. It was bemoaned in the Heaney household but was soon forgotten as such things do inevitably Unless there's a poet in the family! About 30 years later, for apparent reason, Heaney began to think of where the tree had been
In my mind's eye I saw it as a kind of luminous emptiness, a warp
and waver of light, and once again, in a way that I find hard to
define; I began to identify with that space just as years before
I had identified with the young tree.
Except that this time it was not so much a matter of attaching
oneself to a living symbol of being rooted in the native ground;
it was more a matter of preparing to be uprooted, to be spirited
away into some transparent yet indigenous afterlife. The new
place was all idea, if you like; it was generated out of my
experience of the old place but it was not a topographical
location. It was and remains an imagined realm, even if it can be
located at an earthly spot, a placeless heaven rather than a
heavenly place.
(Finders Keepers. Seamus Heaney. Faber & Faber, 2002).
Today just after 4 AM, I was groped awake: heart dangerously
bash-beating itself against the walls of my ribcage, by a most
splendid and magnificent vision. It brought into conjunction many
aspects of my chapter on `The Spiral Castle' in my forthcoming book on Poetic Iconology & The Goddess of Divine Being. Rather like the brief meeting that took place between Keats and Coleridge (the only time they're known to have met each other) on Millfield Lane, when Coleridge reported having felt death in Keats' hand when they shook hands to bid farewell at the end of it. This was a year before Keats received his death warrant in the shape of violent arterial bleeding in the lungs. This, I take to be another event which took place outside the 3 dimensional, physical time-space we usually occupy: `In those 2 miles he broached a thousand things -- Nightingales, poetry On Poetical sensation METAPHYSICS Different genera and species of Dreams NIGHTMARE A dream accompanied by a sense of touch Single and double touch A Dream related First and second consciousness The difference explained between will and Volition MONSTERS The Kraken MERMAIDS A Ghost story (Letter to George & Georgiana Keats. John Keats. 15 April 1819).
In one of my all-time favourite films Before Sunrise, Before Sunset
Celine takes Jesse into the Cemetery of No Name (which actually
exists A cemetery of unknowns, mostly suicides who drowned in the Danube) and shows him her favourite grave of a little girl. She tells him it's her favourite because the girl died aged 9, and that she was the same age when she first came to see the cemetery with her
grandmother. Then she says how uncanny it is that she herself is now 39 but that the girl still somehow remains 9.
I dreamt that I am with my friends Yasir, Enser (now deceased) and
Daniel Who is with Neil. We're waiting for a bus on London Road in my home town. Daniel gets on a bus without us but when we cross the road he is there. He says he had just gone for a ride one stop and had come back. I say "I can't do that because it'll cost me 75 pence" and that that was all that I had at the time. So the dream is
actually set in the past when bus fares were 75 p and Enser was
alive. The traditional theory of the Hortus Conclusus or the Spiral
Castle requires this type of aesthetical understanding of another
time outside and beyond time An adynaton as in Heaney's chestnut tree or as described by Eliot or Valry (whom I quoted in my essay `Fontanelle fons et origo' in terms of poetry). Marina Warner discusses this in detail with reference to Hieronymus Bosch's colossal painting 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' (1504) where he has painted just such a place, in her book Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2002).
In such a world things are reduced in order to retain them complete
as in a photograph or the mind's eye as Bosch has done with his
fruits or as Lewis Carroll does in Sylvie & Bruno Bruno arranges
a dead mouse as a kind of a sofa for Sylvie to sit on. I have argued
in my book such possibilities of contravening physical laws in order
to time travel Of casting dreams as realities Of writing as a
form of time travel where one can, for example, go back in one's mind in order to conjure up a sensation, thought, smell. It would be
interesting to see how much control one has on these things, if any.
This is a world in which one could easily exist as a split identity
occupying the same physical time-space but inhabiting 2 bodies. A
phenomenon Hazrat Bashir Ahmad Orchard discussed with reference to the soul in Life Supreme (Ascot Press, 1979). I experienced such a vision in Lithuania in 1999 which I described in the note to the poem I wrote there called 'Loving Feelings'. A world of parallel time vistas running at different speeds, sometimes overlapping. Auden described coming upon such a vision of a doppelganger sitting, writing at the desk and refusing to look up.
Daniel, Neil, Yasir, Enser and I cross the road to the other side
where the old Pie & Mash shop used to be and `The Haberdashery
Emporium' Another place which inhabits my Hortus Conclusus Just like St Margaret's Church and the abbey grounds or the entire space from Cowbridge Lane to the church existing as an ancient cemetery and in this very dream I saw that the recent building work around Northbury School and the formerly wooded area at the recently built Northern Relief Road has uncovered a section of the same cemetery Or my grandfather's room where he kept all his belongings leading to the vision of the Secret Garden I keep coming back to in my dreams: my vision of Pope's Grotto. What psychologies lie behind it? What law of physics could explain away such things? Auden, more than any other English poet detailed it in his writing of the Great Good Place.
I steal a packet of Bassett's Allsorts and a few packets of sweet
Thai chilli and chicken crisps. Also some boiled sweets. One of
which, a red one, I put into my mouth. Something I would never do in
real life
Such a relation does the Dark Interpreter, whom immediately the
reader will learn to know as an intruder into my dreams, bear to
my own mind. He is originally a mere reflex of my inner nature.
I do not always know him in these cases as my own parhelion.
What he says, generally, is but that which I have said in
daylight, and in meditation deep enough to sculpture itself on
my heart. But sometimes, as his face alters, his words alter;
and they do not always seem such as I have used, or could use.
No man can account for all things that occur in dreams.
Generally I believe this - that he is a faithful representative
of myself; but he also is at times subject to the action of the
good Phantasus, who rules in dreams.
(Suspiria de Profundis. Thomas De Quincey. 1845).
Mysteriously, in some versions `The good Phantasus' appears as `The god Phantasus.' A sort of occult double-pun which works both ways contextually!
I check the time and it is about 9.45 PM. The friends and I cross
over and begin walking down London Road towards Whiting Avenue. At the turning at `The White Horse' pub, there are some tables and chairs laid out where The Muse is sitting with 2 girlfriends, having a candle-lit dinner and drinking white wine. As we go past, she moves so that she is now seated between the 2 girls. The presence of the Goddess-Muse in such visions as in `Kubla Khan' or in Keats' `La Belle Dame Sans Merci' is eminent. As she moves to get up I think she has got up to say something to me I say "HELLO." She replied "You meet my friends, sweetheart." And I awoke, my heart crashing and pounding as in the dream Just as it usually does when I see her.
And thus the entire chapter was esoterically revealed to me and I
spent the morning trying to write down the chain of thoughts it
erupted in me although the original plan for the chapter and some of
the writing was completed some time ago and half in my head in what Pope would call Half-digested for quite some time. A vision, akin to Coleridge's Kubla Khan minus the opium which, incidentally, also describes such an Hortus Conclusus. The chapter began to form into a colossal whole rather like a bomb blast waiting to happen of the sort that Hughes describes in detail in Shakespeare in Shakespeare & The Goddess of Complete Being.
Such a theory, however, abrogates the Christian concept of time and
sin Which I have discussed in another chapter of my book with
reference to Leda The anti-Mary And Yeats' poem `Leda & the
Swan.'
Posted 7 months ago.
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