A verbis ad verbera.

A Confounded Letter about what I think. About opposites.

 

Ah look, you; a demisted daisy mint morning that you sometime see as well as I. See the folded shadow silks across these landscape tables and virgin crossed daylight lines. Watch the landscape of coloured stones lean into history and spread their legends across myriads of belief and green old wives tales.

See gestalt continental maps in the coats of these comfortable grazing animals. View cold myth and hot dragon in the web limit limbs that brush across your once perfect, raised to the wind, face. Catch soft the sphere of the coming sun, risen beyond a gently domed bruised eye line. Find movement in all the coloured ranges of sight, closing, coming together, falling gently apart, riding whole, lovingly clutching and completing. See everything fit perfectly into a general precise theory of correspondences. This is true magic. This is where the ghosts live.

Listen to the music of this female valley, hear the trumpets of its soft round mountains. Sing the roar of its waters finally kissing you awake. Love its deepest crevice and fall into it as something forbidden. Risk all because you can understand this moment as a sacred blessed song. Allow specific gravity to explore your wishes and for what you will understand. Let your sight not follow but exchange and change what it watches. Find the second sight for what it is and use it.

Spread thick and insistent across your dangerous bohemian eye this view and this sound. Serve only your own purpose and truly look. Observe and understand. Draw. Demand your true attention to all these jewelled memories that will only fail because you finally wish them to.

You can see, really see, you see, no more. You can look at nothing. It is not possible now to draw the skeletal lines a priori or smudge the organic tones out of your body.

It is gone, lost in clockwork steam valved revelations and pumping machine hearts. Forgotten in blown glass menagerie thoughts and techno religious revelations. The dark glasses in a graveyard. Staked out on greasy industrial plains and naked soulless, toneless polluted deadscapes.

Sing this as your mantra now. It is what is correct for your right hand mind. You are right. Follow the temporal mathematics of the true new faith in the sickly occasional green and not so now pleasant land. You are allowed no other path to ultimately succeed in your rampant enthusiasm.  Allow no turgid water hypnotising of the senses. Read this agreed tract or be deemed unalive, souldead vampire of the countries formatted vision.

This is the profit of true modern paper folded dogma. A feeling of being hardy yet  together and ultimately useful. Allow no womanly love to enter your inner senses. Keep your right to be right. Your will to be wrong. Agree to nothing, not even this description of yourself. Say give it urgently rather than take it slowly and with reverence. Allow only Scylla and Charybdis sensing and know they are what keep you whole. Listen only to the dead world words of one and keep the other in sight. Avoid both. Keep yourself as pure as the oil in the machine. The monsters are still twinned, remember that. A versis ad verbera..

Author's Note

Trans: From words to blows.
The picture is mine and called A Fantasy on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

Reviews

[Greg the Bard]

My mind is sometimes very much slower than I can read. It makes for a need for quick to the point writing, of which this is not. This does not mean that the work is not aluring but as a good friend of mine once said of Will Shakespear, "I can't understand a thing he said but boy does he have a great way of saying it". I wonder if this is a story about the coming of Vampires or the view from Constatine just before he paints a Oil painting of the local country side. Is the image great it goes without saying but is it one long sentence that will never end I think it has that type of air. I will follow this work with great interest. Thanks for the wonderful write.

[Arthur Henn]

Ken - This is wonderful!

[Ed Hart]

you do dazzle with the dance of your mind...it is always a pleasure to watch your words paint pictures

[SM Davis]

This reader shall perhaps only dream of being whipped into the whirlpool if more of this writing shall await once the spinning stops. The soulful whispers or perhaps momentary screams of the internal conversion should never be so sublimly seductive. A daisy mint morning indeed.

[Kerry O'Connor]

This is really one of the finest pieces of descriptive writing I've read in a long time - your words don't simply skim the surface but burrow.. The juxtaposition of the two halves of this piece, adds depth of meaning to the love of country, and sorrow at seeing it change over time. Excellent word choice employed in changing the tone.
Enjoyed greatly.

[arbitrary jane]

also... the picture... it's glorious and lonely.

[arbitrary jane]

this reads to me like a speech. especially at the end when the voice grows more and more powerful.
we are bidden here time and again to See. to Watch. to Listen. and then, as should be to Sing and to Risk. and then to bring all of the lofty mountain Beauty (the kind of beauty that is not static. that does not only sit to be admired, but works.. works in you and in the Spirit of man to Go and to Do. ...) down into the cold, un-alive world.
breathtaking.
.... cheering from my place between the monsters.

[emmajoy]

Why do the following words make me want to both cheer and weep? There's such a beauty in them, I gasped at their display:

'Listen to the music of this female valley, hear the trumpets of its soft round mountains. Sing the roar of its waters finally kissing you awake. Love its deepest crevice and fall into it as something forbidden. Risk all because you can understand this moment as a sacred blessed song'

Seems there is still the movement of words and meanings set in every part of your thinking. You drift the changes and advise the same, you see the future but stand in history, you lead and walk beside .. you are .. and so is another ..

[Donald Meikle]

Ah look you then! Was it fun dancing through my soul waving fears like flags in sunsets? Oh to be walking through that greenery again, listening to the churchs' songs, ticklin' trout with freezin' fingers. You're majick

[Emily B]

I was just thinking of you, your images of your travels, and here you are, my luck is very good today