The Hermetic Armada of the Psyche

Hello again dear reader.

I was listening to the shipping forecast this morning, I always find it one of the great constants in life. Fastnet, Dogger, the German bight, Cromarty, Viking, Faeroes...mythical names, assaulting the imagination with wind and rain lashed broiling seascapes, unfathomable depths and heroic deeds.

As civilizations rise and fall, national boundaries are re-sculptured and generations briefly bloom and scatter to seed, the Sea, from whence we came, claims all things in its impenetrable implacability. The sea today is iron grey and beyond my feeble emotions and whimsical reflections. It is eternal and uncaring of petty human things.

I am suddenly convulsed by an epiphany as I stare out stained library window at the flat aquatic wastes! I am the lost boy again, teleported to the old landlocked family estate.

It is the spring or autumn Equinox (one of my favourite words) and I am crouched at the distorted, milky glassed 'porthole' style window in one of the giant haylofts on the estate. These, warm, dust-moted cathedrals were the womb of my spiritual rebirth, secret spaces filled with the amniotic atmospheres of other lives and strange mythologies, that were to scribble their ruinic equations on my still soft and delicate mind.

These three broken, patchwork, early Medieval stone ships were to be my hermetic armada, my requisitioned psychic vessels that would carry me on a lifelong voyage to exotic lands, that were then, as now, beyond the ken of reasonable and practical men.

These old barns with their smoky lofts were adjacent to the old stable block, ancient worlds, sanctuary's for this delicate soul, the braying of horses comforting and somehow perfect in the muffled gloom.

Many hours would my younger self spend in those dark spectral grottoes of my imagination. The old Hohner guitar and lined notebook my only companions. Although occasionally, a plum jam sandwich would somewhat square the triangle.

My father had inherited the estate from his parents, and so on for six generations, and what had been a rather beautiful rustic idyll, had over generations of mismanagement, gambling debts and shear stupidity, inevitably decayed and devolved into the tatty monstrosity that became a playground of jaded decadence for the little Ignatius to explore at his 'relative' leisure.

The house being paid for, my father rented out the large stables and a couple of fields to equine lovers, he also acquired a small sum from a reasonably large antiquarian bookshop he part owned in London. Such was the meager income with which the tragic creature had to support a wife and son, a handyman/gardener, pay utilities and rates, the upkeep of an ancient automobile, and all the other 'little' unmentionables... that often accumulate to snap the economic camels back.

And snap it did, and quite spectacularly on one November eve.

Enough, the library is almost dark and the fire is wheezing in the grate, it is time to concentrate on the specious present.

Through the window, the sea is squid ink black and I can feel the heartbeat of the Kraken in its nocturnal awakening...

Saved by the Guitar

School was indeed a trial of some magnitude - both mentally and physically - for the young rust. My fat friend Nick, shy, bespectacled hovering creature that he was, chummed me through the brittle spaces and clattering invasions of less sensitive souls.

Others were indeed objects for my subjectivity through my early school years. This is no philosophic jargonic shorthand either: I attributed no depth of consciousness to the crowd or the separate individual. To me, my world was populated by Cartesian devil's, metaphysicial automatons puppeteered by a malicious god.

How could these shouting apparitions feel what I felt, love what I loved, understand the mystery of the world in its dark and wild essence.

The emotional and physical turbulence created by the hormonal convulsions of puberty, coupled with the vicissitudes of my formal education, were sublimated and channeled somewhat by the receipt of a gift on my thirteenth birthday.

My father, a keen but incurably inept musician, bought a brand new full size acoustic guitar...for himself really...but presented it to me in a fantastically theatrical manner, with my dear mother raising a suspect eyebrow at this bizarre and quite vulgar performance of paternal interest in my apparently latent, but fecund creative abilities.

My mother knew, of course, daddy was betraying the toe-curling symptoms of a mid-life crisis in all its shameful, sad, grinning idiocy. The poor poor man.
Still, every cloud....

I fear the wretch had seen Elvis perform on the blue fizzing blunted cube that passed for a TV in those days, and yearned to scrape back the palimpsest of moronic accretions and un-sheath the Dionysian stag of youth! Problem is, the stag never really existed - only the frightened little boy, hiding behind the veneer of socially and class prescribed adulthood.

It was me who with my father's 'gift' or phallic substitute, would become an agent of unbridled passion and sublime creativity!

I must put the kettle on now, the chill sea breeze does caress these old bones.

Twilight of the Idle

I have never in my life felt more naked and emotionally and spiritually fragile, than on my first day at school.

Dragged out of the 'relatively' rustic bubble of the parental home in the wilds of Shropshire, to find myself marooned in a concrete, lino floored factory shed with the 'townies' - threatens to still my aged heart almost seven decades later!

What a despicable thing to inflict on a nature loving, carefree, naive, open minded, poetic soul such as myself. But then again, don't all children start out as sensitive, receptive little engines of wonder and amazement, born to run and jump and explore what we as 'grown-ups' call childishness, trivia and superficiality.

It is only when we realise we have lost the great game of life, when we are confronted by the sadistic grinning face of THE ETERNAL ADVERSARY, THE OPPONENT, we smile sadly at the 'putting away' of childish things. The child was mine and your true humanity and possibility for transcendental freedom. A poetic and true organic contact with REAL LIFE.

Those burnished plastic corridors, chattering halls and towering bureaucratic sentinels of paternal oppression called 'teachers', represent our first violent baptism into the big IT of something called 'society'.

'Hello' they bark with frozen smiles, forget those simple pleasures and honest wonder. Forget your curiosity, your beautiful oblivion from clocked time and channeled thought; your spontaneity and fear of the dark, because we will always have the lights on bare and stark. I have learned to love the irrationality of Morpheus, the 'long suicide oceans of the night'. I yearn with teenage love-longing for the creature under the bed again.

Death is human enlightenment, cold, white and unforgiving. Life is warm and relenting, and always glimpsed in the twilight purples and golds of the vast oncoming tidal night.

Schools out forever and ever amen.

Goodnight dear reader. To bed at last.

The Library

Hello again.

Crikey, its as cold as nun's nipple out there today.

I dearly hope my grotesque, misshapen form hovering around the woodshed did not still the blood of some unfortunate trespasser! That would constitute an extremity of mental punishment beyond the most Lovecraftian of imaginations.

Its bye the bye for now, the fire is lit and the Nordic spirits are being licked into life in the blood red flame of the old hearth. Ancient companions to an ancient but still pumping heart - for now.

I will of course, hopefully, be joining them in Valhalla when the fates...eer decide my fate. I sincerely hope to ride off into a burnt citrus sunset at the time of immolation, to ride with the Valkyries, Wagner hammering the clouds.

I suspect a generic MDF coffin clattering over industrial rollers, while being bathed in the cyan glow of the great gas god 'Sid' will be somewhat more likely or inevitable however.

Oh yes...the great library.

'Great' is probably somewhat an extension of the truth.

Beautiful oak paneled redoubt of unmentionable age, the library to me, is a representation of my spirit in the physical world. Its many strange and esoteric books, its mechanical contraptions, bottled oddities, taxidermied treasures and beautiful paintings, gasp for air and personal space in this animistic eco-system,
The library is 'alive' in the truest sense of the word.

Forgive me, but I must leave you now, the hammering has begun again....

The Chronicles of an old Bohemian Space Cadet

Warm and profuse greetings to all my readers.

Whether you be sad and lonely, bereft of hope, or wounded and aggrieved by those outrageous arrows of grotesque misfortune, I am sure, you will find something here to enrich and medicate your soul and ignite your little psychic spliff of infinite becoming.

My little house does indeed contain many mansions - both literal and metaphorical - in which you dear reader, are invited to explore, at your leisure.

The tail I have to tell, is a richly hued, fractal tapestry of personal experience, woven over eight decades from the dusty threads of this old farts rambling recollections.

The great Celtic tea leaf himself, Mr Dylan Thomas once said, 'old age should burn and rave at close of day', and indeed, it is my sincerest wish that my lexical ejaculations shall scorch the neural pathways of more receptive and creative minds, rather than be consigned to the silent padded cell of mis-attributed senility. The old marbles, although a trifle chipped, come up a treat when a occasioned by quick polish.

Born into a penniless aristocratic family in the fourth decade of that extraordinary and tragic narrative, known officially as the twentieth century, I began to author a very different life story from the somewhat linear and boorish biographies that people of my familial and social milieu usually end up scribbling on the flimsy papyrus of their personalities.

I was born an introvert, an 'underground man', lonely resentful, over-sensitive, and misunderstood by all those who should have understood. But, alas, one beautiful day the doors of perception were indeed cleansed, and Ignatius Agrippa Hermes Rust went overground at last, to breathe in the rich and rarefied aether of art, literature, science, philosophy and of course...the eternal existential mystery at the heart of life.

I have a plethora of fantastical tales to disseminate to the willing and (very) open minded reader. Tales that encompass this world and many others, populated by characters you will already know and some you cannot really ever know, but only feel, like a guitar chord resonating in the diaphanous butterfly wing of your soul.

This crumbling, isolated and labyrinthine old house from where I wheeze and scribble this document, represents the borderland between the microcosm of my mind and the macrocosm of the vast unfathomable reaches of the cosmic cathedral beyond. As above, so below...as the old saying goes eh.

I have gotten intoxicated in a bomb shelter with Francis Bacon in the Blitz, been humiliated by Duchamp and Beckett on the chessboard, punched in the eye by Jack Kerouac (on more than one occasion), spat on by Michel Foucault, sat down with Situationist's, jammed with Keith Richards in Marrakesh, got splattered by Pollock, propositioned by Warhol, and digressed on the compensations of old age during an exquisite Parisian lunch with Henry Miller.

I will relay some of these tales in more depth later of course, and many more, remarkable for there strangeness and oddity.

But I must leave you for the moment, I have a chicken and mushroom Pot Noodle that awaits my moaning belly.