The Visitor

I saw a light under the water last night.
It was just after ten according to the old clock. I was brewing a kettle for a last cuppa before bed, the only illumination in the kitchen being the light from the hallway and the neon blue eye of the rumbling appliance.

I felt rather than saw something poke at my awareness at first. Turning to the window, I saw a mere glint on the horizon. A fishing boat? A low flying aircraft? No it was on the water...it must be. A searchlight from a helicopter? No, there was no beam, nothing in the sky that I could see, no sound...

As I moved closer to the window, I felt a sharp tickle of anxiety, that rapid twist of hyper-vigilance mixed with confusion, as my mind attempted to rationalize what I was seeing - or thought I was seeing.

There was something moving towards me 'under' the water, and it was glowing in the dark.
A shimmering spectre of lime green luminosity, crawling toward the house from across the mouth of the bay.

I estimated it must have been around 60 feet across at its widest point. Its shape shifted constantly: morphing into a teardrop for a heartbeat, and then elongating into a crude arrowhead shape, all the time the sickly green light shimmering as it was refracted by the water.

The light was so intense the closer it got, I began to shuffle back from the window, inch by inch, my eyes never leaving the yellow/green 'thing'. I had a premonition that if I were to avert my gaze, just for a moment, there would be hideous and possibly fatal consequences.

Oh my God, what if it came inside the house! I was frozen, petrified to stone, trembling in horror in my saggy underpants, a lumpy, sinewy, deathly pale old man, silhouetted by the hall light at my back, my facade illuminated by the ghastly green aurora from outside.
Indeed, the whole kitchen was now glowing in sympathy with the eerie spectral thing.
I briefly thought of getting my camera, but almost as if in league with my thoughts, the light...disappeared!

The dark kitchen and pale orange glow from the hall once again. And that was all.
I slowly exhaled, realizing that I had been holding my breath for over a minute or more.
What in the Lord's name was that?
Did it reach the house? The light so bright...
I nervously moved toward the window, every muscle in my body tensed -'fight or flight'(more likely die of fright.)

I could just make out the black contour of the peninsula to my left against the lighter charcoal of the night sky, starless and somehow expectant. I could sense rather than see the water below me, a heaving mass of unknowable depths. An abyss.

I listened and searched the darkness for anything, a sign, something. Like an animal being pursued by its most feared predator, my senses became preternaturally keened.
Nothing.

Suddenly, I found a bit of backbone at last...and ran like a bastard for the stairs, tripping a couple of times before flying headlong through my bedroom door. Gathering myself and wheezing like a leaky boiler, I bolted the bedroom door and swiped the old 12-bore Purdey off the top of the wardrobe.

I always keep the old girl loaded (with the safety on), as a bit of insurance for occasions such as these. That old bat of a cleaner is always whining about how dangerous it is blah, blah, blah - shut it you decrepit old harridan or I'll bag you next.
I know I'm digressing again aren't I.
Anyway, I was about to approach the window for another gander, when something happened.
Something so heart stopping in its time displaced banality, that I felt the warm trickle of urine on my right inside leg...

Someone or something had rapped the front door knocker loudly - precisely three times!

Reflections on the Soul

I sit here in this cold dark house watching the rain spit at the windows.
I feel spat on today. I feel rejected, old and discarded like an old sofa in some derelict house.
Lumpy and uncomfortable, stained with piss, shit, tea and coffee - weird and baroque nicotine fungi flowering in the sediments of my ancient crumbling springs.

On days like this, I know so intuitively and so deeply - the material world is evil and deceitful. Like a costumed spiv at a fairground sideshow, I see its malignant eyes flash in shallow mirth, reflecting the steely cold of nothingness behind the tatty but pretty facade of visible things.

The scientist James Jeans, back in the 30's called matter 'bottled light'- decelerated energy reduced to banal, objective corporeality.
The collapse of the wave function has never seemed such an appropriate term for my present malaise.

Where are you now spirit? The Grecian Daemon, the Egyptian Ka, the Roman 'genius', the old flaky Ghost in the machine?

The machine has won for today. I am reduced to a dumb, metallic, mechanized algorithm, tapping out a turgid Morse code to cold interstellar space.
Major Tom to ground control, I'm floating in the most peculiar way, and the stars look very different today.

Come back here right now Daemon!
Popped out for a fag break have you? Hit the road in search of a younger, more palatable and promising host?
You fickle and feckless mistress, you tuppenny strumpet!

Never mind, maybe the Goddess will grace me with her esoteric presence this eve, or even Charon bobbing about in the moonlight would liven things up a bit.

Yes, I feel better already!

The children of the sea

Driftwood Sans Drift
Originally uploaded by Peter Kurdulija

The sea.
Heartless in its ignorant beauty, a rolling behemoth of blind force and fury that cannot be reasoned or bartered with. It just is and will ever be.
The ocean consumes the exquisite perfection of platonic forms, and then digests them in its acid black belly juice, before spitting out the decomposing, salt weeded creatures on the gull screeched sands.

I have been an inveterate beachcomber for most of my long life, but since arriving at The House, and having the tides at the door - so to speak - I am often up at the first dragons spit of dawn in the summer months to catch the more...interesting ejections and erections scattered by my unwitting liquid benefactor.

Indeed, I have a room devoted to the more bizarre and exceptional pieces - more uncultured minds may even call them 'monstrosities'.

I believe their unique deathly beauty is beyond shallow all too human moralities, and speaks only to the aesthetics of the sublime that lie beyond good and evil...

The peculiar isolation of my house enables a certain discretion to flourish, and I was somewhat grateful for the latter on this very morn, when old father Neptune had once again left Iggy a little 'pressie'!

By the time I had dragged the enchanted object to the house, I was glad for the muscular stamina I still possessed, courtesy of my regular bicycle expeditions to that accursed den of interbred halfwits they call the 'local village'.

I will digress on my 'treasure' at another time, for the moment all you need to know is...death has a Dionysian beauty that the shallow candle flame of Apollo can never hope to illuminate.

Tales from the Electric Shaman

The Who.
Always adored Roger and Johnny Entwistle, Keith of course was like a mischievous, precocious child: a wild eyed trickster character constantly stirring the creative and psycho-dynamic broth.

Townshend had a peculiar charm, definitely an acquired taste. He could be somewhat difficult and earnest, often bordering on what might be called 'pretentious' by the more uncharitable of critics.

I remember that evening in the Railway Tavern in '64 when Townshend first smashed his guitar. Myself and some curious 'colleagues' from the Slade (where I was in the final year of a fine art degree) had decided to pop down for something of a boys night out.

We all noticed how jittery, restless and angular the guitarist looked; the big nose, the Rickenbacker, the slashing chord strokes - we all guessed he was high on Benzedrine.

Anyway, there was this absolute deliciously hilarious moment where, in his manifest excitement, the poor man (or should I say boy) rammed the headstock of his guitar through the low ceiling.

Well, the entire room erupted, and I - well sauced by now and full of youthful pepper - shouted over the throng, "Go on you yahoo, smash the fucking thing up, it'll sound better than the other racket we've had to endure for the last hour - just call it Auto-destructive art!"

Well, to my utter astonishment, Townshend appeared to pause for a moment, his eyes searched me out through the crowd...and then, shaking his head as if awakening from a daze, he began to beat the shit out of that once beautiful instrument.

The noise was atrocious, like a little dog being mounted by a a stallion, but the crowd appeared to lap it up, they were almost hysterical as were my friends. I on the other hand, felt a certain apprehension, some kind of cosmic shift, like I was witnessing a shamanic ritual, the effects of which would be felt for generations.

Music had suddenly become primitive and dangerous, edgy, and dare I say it...'sexy'.
I recall mentioning the incident to Pete a few years later when we were jamming together after a gig,"Oh that was YOU was it!" he exclaimed, "Cheers mate, got any other ideas?"

At which point I showed him a particularly complex strumming progression involving suspended major 4th chords, which I firmly believe (know) became the signature riff to 'Pinball Wizard'. Well, we all have to do our bit for counter-cultural development eh! I'm not bitter at all: I'm a facilitator, a catalyst, a Hierophant and an avatar for the holy spirit of rock 'n roll.
Modesty has never been a virtue in my book I'm afraid.

I've had many similar experiences to this over the years, I was in the right place at the right time as they say. Or to be more truthful, I believe I was propelled by certain circumstances and synchronicity's whereby mythological archetypes were at work. I am something of an electric shaman.

Another good tale was the Syd Barrett incident at The UFO in '67 when some hippy chick spilled vodka on the kaleidoscopic oscillating filters and Syd claimed he's finally seen the light.
Poor Syd, some shamans are burnt by their own fire.

Anyway, another tale for another time. To bed.

The man in the wind and the west moon

I saw Charon again last night.
It was a particularly high tide with heavy winds, I should have guessed he’d try again. The creepy old bastard.

The house was rattling like a Pharaohs jewelery box as I staggered downstairs in my dressing gown, gasping for a ciggy and a cuppa in a feeble attempt to placate my aggressive insomnia.
Ugh! Morpheus, Morpheus where art though? Come back you elusive little git, even Hierophants like me need a decent kip now and again!

The kitchen was ghostly in the moonlight, funereal – maybe that’s what made me pad silently to the window. I was hoping to see her again, the Goddess, it was her type of weather (she’s fussy): lunar atmospherics, slight chill in the air, and that sensation of imminence, pregnancy and expectation.

The first thing that hit me was: Christ these windows need cleaning! After I’d been released from that initial horror and actually looked through the glass, my somewhat black and careworn heart received another jolt – almost equal in amplitude to the former, but infinitely more…tiresome.

Out on the fizzing, moon silvered platter of the sea, something gleamed and shimmered even brighter, terrifying in its bone white fluorescence.
Charon is his white robe and little black boat!

There he is again like a stale fart plying his trade on the Styx, eternally ferrying souls to Hades. Maybe his metaphysical Satnav is on the blink, this is the Irish Sea you plonker!
Fuck off and get a life! Oh the delicious irony.

He’s always a bit 'previous’, I haven’t even played chess with death yet.
Mind you I don’t fancy my chances, forward thinking has never been my forte.
I much prefer to get lost in life, immerse myself in its tingling symbolism – like a man who eschews a brolly in a downpour because he wants to feel the weather on his face, a reminder of his body in the world.
Nothing between me and the raw ‘IT’ of existence.

Anyway, I waved, pulled a few faces and then gave him the finger. I Swear I saw him shudder? He sat down in his little craft and began the slow row back to the Stygian shit hole he came from.
Good riddance knobhead!

Oh the emotional vicissitudes of this hermetic odyssey!
Whenever I see Charon bobbing about in his boat in the chill of the night, a few lines of Dylan Thomas always crawl like a glistening lizard into my consciousness:

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

Meditations on a toilet seat

I burnt my arse again the other day.
My own stupid fault I know – and my poor eyesight. Lord knows the cleaner tends to do a good job during the week, but I sometimes have ‘accidents’ as you can imagine at my age (or maybe you don’t want to.)
Nothing too serious, just a dribble or an over enthusiastic turd springing forth before the cheek hits the seat.

Anyway, in my emotional and physical turmoil I tend to attack the evidence of my disloyal bowel with a complete bottle of Domestos and a toilet roll.
I should elaborate a little lest I give the wrong impression – I attack the toilet itself NOT my arse, well not deliberately anyway.
The problem is, in my haste I sometimes leave an invisible residue of neat bleach lying on the plastic perch.

Unwittingly on my rather speedy and irregular return to the faecal throne a few hours later… I am bitten by this covert chemical Cobra!
Lo, do my already cottage cheese buttocks now bear the hideous stigmata of this errant bowel/bleach conspiracy.
Is there to be no peace.
Just another sling and arrow of outrageous misfortune that assails this old man in his autumnal decline into the cold dark winter of becoming a rotten vegetable.

Ironic though really.
I, of all people should know better. Has it not been my life’s work to stare shit in the face? To lift the plastic lid on the stained toilet bowl of humanity? To emancipate the skid marks of truth from the totalitarian bleach of the moral majority?
Yet here I am like a deranged Stepford wife, neurotically scrubbing away any evidence of my very human/animal nature.

‘The toilet’, ‘the bathroom’, ‘the powder room’, ‘the loo’, ‘the John’, ‘the can’, ‘the lavatory’, ‘the crapper’, ‘the bog’…’the shit house’.
What a shameful place this room occupies in our physical life and imagination. That quiet little sanctuary where we sit like naughty schoolchildren, alone with the irrefutable evidence of our embarrassing bodies.
Whether pauper or king, we are reduced to a pathetic defecating animal in our little vestibules, before the flush and wipe of forgetting enables a rapprochement with our more comfortable spiritual selves.

In my youth I executed a series of self- portraits to illustrate the existential profundity of what I call the ‘little death’ – the defecatory moment of shame and vulnerability where we are prematurely imprisoned and objectified by the demands of this traitorous body, like a corpse on a marble slab.
Alas, the art world was unprepared and so were the general public for my investigation into this darker and more pungent realm of human activity.

Now, its time to get my shit together and make tea, tatty bye.

The night stalker

I did it again last night.
Spent almost the entire night from midnight till dawn exploring every room, every little cubbyhole, drawer, crack and crevice trying to find 'it' again.
This is a big house: Large farmhouse kitchen with fire place and rear entry, big walk-in pantry and separate wash room, 3 other large high ceilinged ground-floor rooms (one of course the beloved library).

The first floor contains my boudoir and two other empty rooms and a rather lovely bathroom with Victorian claw footed tub. The top story is partitioned into two massive whitewashed spaces; the first is populated my easels, paintings old and new and various artistic tools, materials and paraphernalia. The second contains nothing but an old wardrobe and two ancient rolled up rugs.
The derelict and rubble strewn north-west 'wing', cellar and woodshed always constitute the final challenges on my regular nocturnal itineraries.

I lit the brand new big fat cream candle that sat in its silver holder and turned all the lights out at the mains - no parachute, no surrender!
I began as usual on the ground floor, edging my way through the darkness, step by step.

I love the way the naked flame is tickled by the innumerable little drafts that whisper like invisible serpents throughout this strange old place. I know that occasionally these cold eddies are the exhalations of unexplained things: the occult vapors of silent watchers forever lost in their own desolate houses...my brief passing candle flicker illuminates their strange predicament for a moment, and then the cold darkness rolls back in like a brutal black wave of nothingness.

Funny how even the most familiar objects - my old chair, books, that mahogany sideboard, guitar, bed etc - take on an otherworldly appearance in the jittering sepia candlelight. My physical world becomes metaphysical with the simple addition of a primitive flame in the darkness.

Like an archaeologist I explore my Lascaux, deciphering the marks of human passage and symbolism, scouring the runic graffiti for unforeseen relationships, odd juxtapositions, indications, doorways to the great elsewhere. Mundane objects become chiaroscuro graphics open to multiple interpretations.

The sounds and textures are so delicious in the darkness too. All those creaks and groans, that subliminal hum that is suppressed by the buzz of daylight and mundane visual imperialism.
Night is the servant of sound. The thick darkness speaks in dead languages, a skeletal hand tapping old brick. I just need to tune in, catch the wavelength, kill the static and isolate THE WORD.
That will set me free.

I am the Minotaur lost in his labyrinth, desperate to find a way out.