Author: philipparees

Symphonic Prose. (I introduce the unorthodox- but apologise for mentioning Involution).

I know the true poet finds his words
In charcoal dreams, a soft-shuffle roundelay
That emanates from reflections in pools of solitude,
While the tongue licks a pencil, to hear the heart’s pause
Seeking the metre to echo, the right line to lead.

Mostly he wraps silence in a paper screw of words
That offers the liberty to linger on the grass
Where clouds above scud images into personal tastes,
Tonguing newly minted thoughts, striped zebra sharp
With wintergreen, storm liquorice, or dripping caramel.

What is meant by symphonic prose?

The traditions of poetry imply assiduous attention to every word, the inflections of each line, somehow squeezing the universal from the minimal. The secrets it unwraps are those of the deeps, calling out both admiration and assent. Good poets express what everyone recognises as true, as precious, as both self-evident and revelatory. The poetically appreciative reader gives such meticulous artistry due weight, reads aloud like T.S Eliot, intoning each phrase to pay tribute to profundity, and stop the listener as certainly as a nightingale in a darkling wood. Poetry demands attention, and part of the resistance to it is to that imperious demand that says ‘Stop. Heed me’. Most hurry on, slightly cross, unless they are at a funeral, when they find it apt. Poetry takes its head from silence and the inexpressible.

In contrast here is explicit reference to too much ‘artistry’ that kills sympathy.

A similar obsession…
In Dürer’s roving and audacious eye, 
Which served all fillets carefully deboned…
He stroked each hair upon a frightened creature…
Each wrinkle on a toothless listless hag…
The pitiless details of the lucid surface
Somehow cauterize the sympathetic heart

It is science’s cauterisation in its ‘pitiless details’ that the symphony of a renewed science seeks to re-calibrate, without any loss of logic or meaning: Mystical language for mystical science. Involution proposes that Mankind has step-by-step recovered the memory encoded through time and stands at the brink of dissolution; mind and matter melting into one another as a single ‘field’ of energy. Although I did not consciously plan to ape Parmenides, his incantatory instructions in his great poem were about the return to the Goddess, in which words were both musical and vehicles of approach to the great Union of Love; an early knowledge of mantra. It might be further evidence of the hypothesis  (of return to origins) that Parmenides found me, rather than the other way round.

The Dominating Perception of ‘Po-e-try’: Po faced.

In the last post I set out to talk about Reality and Perception and the ways in which perception both creates and distorts the attempt to bridge the gulf between them. Poetry has a deserved and undeserved reputation, and it is the undeserved that I am up against, the belief that it requires different ways of reading, and demands a sort of reluctant reverence. Why is that? Is it because, unlike logical prose that takes by a collar and leads away, it expects the reader to take the steps without hand holding, and does not even cut the grass across which he might have to walk?

The suggestion from a recent supporter was that I had written symphonic prose, not poetry. He was right.  A symphony is more like a tapestry than a painting. It has an underlying structure, warp and weft, and the threads that weave it are to make manifest something else, a picture emerging from elements, both repeated, juxtaposed, modulated; different in different light, richer in certain angles. Pull out any one and disintegration begins. So it is with the warp and weft of consciousness. All needs all; each level of complexity repeats and interweaves. The picture rides above the structure; ’emerges’ from it. That was my hope in writing this way; the scaffolding of science to reveal the cathedral of consciousness. It has no beginning or end. This journey is a wandering at whim and can begin in a crypt or a clerestory.

Not ‘heavy duty’ but material at hand. ( Demolition and Reclamation)

The lines do not demand weighty emphasis, the words ( and indeed the arbitrary subjects selected) chosen were for economy and evocation to throw the rug out wide, not roll it up. They are as easy and logical as prose but without apologies, evidence or persuasion. I wrote a symphonic construction in which each part was there to serve the whole, unimportant except in service to that. I suggested it should be read at an easy canter, and what fell would not matter. You do not stop a symphony because you missed the entry of the bassoon, it will colour anyway and it will augment what you missed on its return. So it is in Involution- an Odyssey. A symphony is a journey through the changes each makes to the all, reshaping silence, to which it returns.

One reviewer really understood its intentions: The reader who finishes the book will not be the same as the one who began it. New ideas will expand the mind but more profoundly, the deep, moving power of the verse will affect the heart. This book was a written pilgrimage…( Marianne Rankin- Alister Hardy Foundation)

Language is linear, but symphonic prose is the closest it can get to music. Contemporary poetry manages the pure tones of single instruments; the brief scales, the short songs: So personal it is unassailable until it finds echoes. Epic poetry takes us on the march of Roman legions; narrative poetry is now almost reviled. You are lyrical or you write epic, and please decide. Might symphonic prose escape and fare a little better? That was the hope. The penalty already lies in the belief that no ‘real’ science can be found within poetic language- again the perception may trump what lies above the structure, it’s the picture ultimately that is important. It proposes a serious and coherent alternative to Evolution’s accidental and competitive precepts which may be missed because the language is evocative and not didactic; the left brain does like to take control. It is provided for (in footnotes) but I’m damned if its shrill caveats and hair splitting deserve any more homage.

Redressing the balance; restoring the wood.

Science has missed the wood of the over-arching canopy which guided those in mental balloons, the geniuses who entered states of union with contemplation, and always returned with the bigger picture, the synthesis, the dissolution of either-or into both-and. As Henri Bergson said  ‘The intellect may be compared to a carver, but it has the peculiarity of imagining that the chicken always was the separate pieces into which the carving knife divides it. Science still supposes that consciousness is emitted by the (mainly) human brain. When you give the material so much importance, it is no wonder it bites back, diminishing the field in which we create and are created, to allow sparks across a synapse ( or a few) to give the brain authority rather than understanding its cellular receptivity as a fine tuned radio: as a momentary coherent synchrony that introduces each to the all, and makes each the transmitter of integrated Mind. It is DNA that listens to language and sound,changes its ‘mind’, and its instructions and talks throughout the biosphere. Writers, dancers and musicians express what Neuro scientists are trying to pin down, like the butterfly collections under glass- not only no longer living, but netted in the wrong arena. Instinctively we trust body language, and cells speak louder and instantly, yet belief in the supremacy of brain blinds all inquiry. It is an ‘interpreter’ that’s all.

It is becoming commonplace to  hear ‘You create your world- just change your outlook’ but somehow this is seldom levelled at the collective creation of science and its materialism.

The left brain has had the field for too long, this symphonic prose liberty with language was to re-engage the right brain and the heart, reviving the wood, carved heedlessly by the scientific intellect, leaving only desolate bones.

The Vivid Experience: Words Approximate

The anemone of the human brain
Combs through a sea of mind:
The skull as porous as a sponge
To soak ideas from passing tides
The syllables of words or shapes…
Or music scored on silent stave
The needle placed upon the groove
Replays, whenever brain is tuned
To Beethoven’s vibration.

Reality and Perception

The ‘Sea of Mind’ Metaphysical Connections.

The impulse to re-focus this blog emerged from reading a book snatched at a Morrison’s checkout- not the sort of book I normally choose, and because it was a present had to be consumed at speed. The book was David Nicholl’s ‘US’, built like an American sandwich, simple ingredients, carefully layered. A deceptively breezy and sometimes deliciously droll account of the ending of a marriage while doing a ‘European Grand Tour’ to educate a bolshy and unsanitary son before he flew the nest (and hopefully patch-plaster the widening cracks).

Superficially light hearted and self deprecating, the profundity lies between the lines. We start to bear witness to the reluctant understanding of the aggrieved and desperate father, Douglas, whose certainty in his moral and practical virtues (and his perplexity that they are never appreciated) becomes the pedantry and dullness his wife longs to escape and his son runs away from at the first opportune excuse.

That led me to this emphasis on perception. All his intentions were laudable, all his stratagems for the sake of his family loving and appropriate. That was what his wife and son could not stand. They were imprisoned by his good intentions, foresight, and all that safety. They wanted to be allowed their chaos, and ill-discipline, wanted to wing it, but he followed maps and itineraries, saving them from themselves. I feel that saving us from ourselves is omnipresent in so many writing guides, programmes, checklists. There may be safety in numbers, but I’m not sure whether there are numbers in safety.

What was important was not what he did, but how it was perceived. There was no bridging this divide, not even atypical heroism on his part. This very funny book was ultimately tragic. No reality changed their perception, once lodged.

Perceptions about Writing.

You can see where I am going with this?  The timing of this book chimed with my own necessity to re-think my frustrations. The world of writers and writing is all about perception. Anything that stretches the boundaries beyond the perceived limits  (appropriate genres, plausible characters, believable predicaments, even outré sci-fi constructions) are deemed not merely un-commercial but somehow illegitimate, and if too bold, reprehensible. The experiences which might demand new languages, (in my case newly termed by a new reader ‘symphonic prose‘ to escape the perception of po-e-try as ‘difficult’ ‘obscure’, or just hard going- when in fact it makes the story of Western Scientific thought easier), and which could help break down those limited categorisations are fiercely resisted. Considered pretentious, called excessive.

Like all modern minimalism what is de rigeur must be understated, yet write the History of Science in poetry and minimalism is no longer applauded. It seems we occupy those Victorian strip gardens, in which only one unorthodoxy is permitted to visit the out-house at a time, but all button up before coming out. (Perhaps in this unstructured world we feel safer behind bars? Even self imposed ones.)

Self publishing accepts the Challenge- to be as good as the ‘Others.’

Even self published writers who, for the present, strive for recognition by conforming to emphatic exhortation, work within the accepted parameters. They push past the gatekeepers (the traditional publishing strait jackets) but mostly with perfectly edited, professionally covered books to prove the gatekeepers blinkered or myopic. Not fundamentally wrong. The numerous advisers on how to write novels, draft dialogue, plot plots, end chapters with requisite hooks, are basing those injunctions on the standards applied by those they seek to trump. Know your market, establish your platform, work the algorithms are all ways to compete along the known pathways.

When I began, knowing nothing ( I still know very little), I took courses in how to pitch, how to frame a synopsis, how to hook in a bio, and the more of it I did, the more I realised that nothing I wanted to write about would fit any of the assumptions, or answer any of the questions. Precisely because my experiences that underpinned writing were all out of the box too. Way out. An accidental (but unrepentant) square peg. But truth must always be stranger than fiction, so keep truth out.

Not Wrong, but Not Enough.

I am not suggesting these advisers are wrong. They give generously of their knowledge. Those things work. MacDonalds sell a lot of hamburgers too. What I am hoping to do is to question the perceptions that make those established procedures the only acceptable ones. Like Douglas in ‘US’ I have my own rigidity, mainly aesthetic and relating to language itself. I too find adverbs in excess irritating. I also find the implausible remark out of context, or heavy duty exposition as though I cannot be trusted to make connections, enough to abandon. As I would any pub bore by making my excuses. But I read an author whose books are far from copy perfect, have occasional errors, but are riveting in terms of ideas and judging by the five stars he gets on a daily basis many others read him with devotion and pleasure.

He does not need to care. Or simply chooses not to care. I hope one day to achieve his sanguinity; I will never achieve his prolific output. His ideas are far ahead of those prevailing, yet revealed through fictional situations and sympathetic characters. He breaks all the rules about dialogue; introduces philosophy and at some length; writes in multifarious genres, including essays; sails close to sermons and laughs at convention and himself. I suspect he is not a joiner of groups and has not researched his ‘likely readership’ or where they ‘hang out’, or written a pitch perfect letter. I am sure he knows exactly how far out to swim, and still keep a toe hold on a reader’s expectations. I envy his debonair savoir faire. His books will never be blockbusters ( they are too challenging) but alone he is proving the conform police over prescriptive. Most of the books I admire and some I choose to review are of this nature:original, far out, demanding.

Creative Destruction.

I believe in collective creation. What we adhere to becomes stronger: What we cease to respect will incrementally dissolve. Together we can really change the circus; alone we’ll die unknown and un-mourned.

Adventures usually begin by destroying barriers. Mostly those in the mind. I would like to find other writers who feel the same and together we may locate readers who value beasts who push through hedgerows rather than gates. I hope that interviews with a few brave pioneers will illuminate the wires they want to cut, the palisades they’d like to scale. And, if appropriate, how they have? Next post I will attempt to defend the use of symphonic prose, or argue its legitimacy.

If you want to be interviewed for a guest appearance and say what you never have elsewhere, (away from the peril of consequences) feel free to subscribe to this blog or email me (address provided on the right). I can write you an interview or host a let rip, providing it is civil to people. About ideas, and indignations I am open to anything. I have been told I do not exist, ( no footprints in the web sand) so like Harry with his invisibility cloak I have new freedoms. I intend to enjoy them, keep writing, and hope for company.

Reality Redefined.

The mirror glass is still intact
Dividing us from all there is…
No metronome controls the tune:
The podium seems vacant, but
All clamour and would fain conduct.
The score mislaid, and not yet bowed,
The key itself is undefined…
The concert now is being tuned
By discordant soloists
Trumpets blown are all their own…

Not being a proficient musician I have only the currency of words. They are plucked out of silence. When I christened this blog ‘Careless Talk‘ it left the more important part, ‘Costs Lives’ implicit. That was because I hoped the life of writing, and other writers would complete it. It was an invitation to those who understood silence to gather round and illustrate the ‘cost of their lives’ from which were derived decisions to write. Instead I suspect it was misunderstood as the sanctioning of the trivial or ill-considered. So perceived, so it appeared, a soliloquy diverting at best, but inconsequential. No programme, no benefits, no bullet lists, little relevance. There is no time, these days, simply to be amused or diverted, or even provoked. All must be to some gain, or some progress. We are all in such a hurry going nowhere, elbowing our way as nicely as possible.

As the observant might notice my site is no longer ‘ Mavericks and Inspiration’ or ‘Quite Serious Fun’ but re-christened ‘Reality Redefined’. What I hope to keep in focus is the gulf each of us steps across to render wordless experience into words. Experience is wordless.  It is the silence that gives shape to words, poetry most tellingly, but even the podium on which prose holds forth, around which characters strive to ‘reach goals’ plots ‘turn pages’, or polemic bangs its drum, starts with the first word ‘Once…’ or variants thereof.

Our voices are shaped by our lives, our words by the fit between the reality of our unique journey and what we distil as worthy of offering, valuable, quirky, creative or escapist. Choices govern. As writers we have a mission (though few would be brave enough to admit it.) Affirming our identity, our unique vision we set words down, and hope for one other to say ‘I get who you are, and what you are about.’ In writing we first find out about ourselves; in publishing we look in the mirror that reflects back.

It does not always reflect clearly. The perception in the mirror might be fogged due to the indiscriminate and clumsy words themselves, or, more often, the angle of light, the disposition of the glass slanted against a clear reflection, or a failure to stand still and let the image focus. Or it is just not what we expected, so we do not see at all.

If I have a passion it is to stand clear of coercion. If I have a skill I hope it is to make space for the perfection of the individual. It is why Involution- An Odyssey, a history of Western thought, tells the rosary beads of genius, on which our seeming certainties all rest. We have been indoctrinated by the soulless narrative that we have arrived here by accident, our ephemeral short lives meaningless in the greater scheme of creation. No wonder we all shout to contradict. Before we drown in the story we have collectively agreed upon, and make it true.

I disagree with almost all of it.  Reality is not that story (or that stony). That is only the perception.

This blog will explore the difficulties of a Reality up against that Perception; how it occasions compromise, subverts the original, feeds on competition, persuades the unique to dress more soberly to pass muster. My invitation now is amended from the ‘careless talk’ to the ‘costed’ lives. Join in and shout, interrupt, contradict. Suggest guest posts or interviews that affirm your unique experiences and how (if you write) it shaped that writing? If you read what changed when you found that reflection? If consciousness creates then you share the responsibility of assent. Amend that assent, give us your caveats.

The spiritual is not a sentiment, or a posture, but a vigorous affirmation of your place in the symphony of consciousness. I hope to reaffirm. Please join me? Subscribe and add weight, every little helps.

Trivial does not make much sense
In symphonic consciousness…
Relationships are intricate.
A piccolo will penetrate
The deep ocean of a unison bass.