I’ve been returning to the park I described my visit to in this entry a few months ago, I’ve been going there almost every day that I’m not working or doing something else. And I very rarely am doing something else, so I’ve returned quite a few times now. Possibly as many as half a hundred already, at least I’m probably getting close to that number. I really have found somewhere special, and it’s close by as well so I can get there whenever I want. I’ve never had an experience quite as powerful as that first visit, although I did have a slightly similar one that I mentioned in the follow up I wrote, but I still feel like there’s some magic about this place that hasn’t faded. I remember being very concerned that would happen, that after a few visits the power would be lost completely.
It’s impossibly pretty, whatever the weather. I’ve been caught in heavy rain on more than one occasion and still been happy to watch the little pools of water form in the areas where the ground dips. The water takes on a sort of purplish tinge, maybe some optical effect caused by the interaction of the rust coloured autumn leaves and the mud below. I tried to get a photograph but I couldn’t really capture it. It just looked like a muddy puddle, with some dried leaves floating on top. Yet in person those muddy puddles are truly beautiful to me, I could stare into them for hours. The day after it rains might be when the place is most beautiful, the way the grass so verdant and fresh stretches out all around inspires a yearning within for true unbound grassland.
What you just read were the only two paragraphs I actually wrote for a post that I intended to write many months ago, shortly after the two more it links to, but totally forgot about. I started it during a time when I was visiting the local park in question several times a week, every day I wasn’t working and even on a couple of occasions after work when it was dark. I would go every day, and every day I would simply wander around for an hour or two in a half daze taking in the atmosphere and beauty of it. I gradually began to fear less and less that the connection I had to the place would fade, and of course it was when I completely lost that fear and my visits became another dull habit that the magic finally did leave.
From late summer, through Autumn, and into the first days of winter I did have a good thing going though; and during my many visits I frequently would find myself fantasising about creating some kind of great work of art to mark my time in this park. Lines of poetry would pop into my head, from everywhere I stood I felt like I was viewing the perfect photograph, and from my favourite area of the park – because I explored it thoroughly in my many visits, and didn’t just stick to the small area I had seen that first time going – which was that first found field, I would form stories of the grandest scope in my mind.
I remember one particular visit, towards the end of this period (during November) where a storm was heading towards me, I could see the dark clouds filled with rain looming in the distance when I looked backwards as I arrived at the park entrance nearest to where I live. I was listening to an album by this band called Taake, the second in a trilogy of concept albums about “death, Norway, and the devil in man” apparently. I walked up and along the path which is on your right as you enter and noticed it was beginning to get dark. It was early evening, and I turned around to look at the sky and saw the clouds much closer now and the feeling of rain about to hit. A wall of rain was rushing towards me along the tree lined path.
I began heading down a slope into this more wooded area, which I had avoided that first trip but now been down several times, and the fourth track on the album was playing. I put my hood up, and almost right after that I began to feel the first drops of rain hitting it. In my head, a grand narrative was playing out. I saw in my mind a man of antediluvian appearance, rags and bones tied to his waist. Some kind of Neolithic hunter-gatherer, his brown matted hair soaking as he stood in a wide expanse ringed by mountains. He had also been attempting to outrun the storm, and then as I walked along I felt his story forming in my mind. Then this particular track that was playing comes to an incredible crescendo and I realised the storm that followed him was in fact a wrathful god. I saw lighting cracks in the darkening sky of this alternative world I was glimpsing, and the man once again took off at a run.
It was a whole film that played out in my head, and I began to see it as something that could be seen on a screen. A full feature length film with not a single line of dialogue, just music and visuals. Almost like an incredibly long music video, perhaps all from one coherent album, but the music existing to serve the visual experience rather than the other way around. A film which lays on various grand and age old themes of heroism, man’s contention with nature/ the elements, and so on. I’ve always had these kinds of experiences, walking to school or stuck in my bedroom as a kid I’d dream up ideas of what seemed to me at the time to be amazing artistic visions. I’ve always had a creative impulse; but neither the talent, skill or resources required to manifest anything worthwhile from it.
An artist is a composite of all those things. We have a surfeit of self described “Creatives” in the modern day, but few artists. I’m not an artist, and one of the few positive qualities I have (my self awareness) prevents me from even seeing myself as merely a creative type. Yet I have always had this impulse, which is one of those necessary characteristics that an artist is made up of. This park was for a time able to draw it out of me much more consistently, you could almost say that it functioned as my muse. I would go there and often listen to music but sometimes just walk around and listen to the sound of the birds in the trees or dogs barking and so on, and enter a state that I would describe as mildly hypnagogic.
If normal hypnagogia can be described as having one foot in the world of dreams and the other fully in reality, then you could say when on these visits I was merely dipping a finger into dream. Everything I was reading and watching and contemplating during those months would stew in my mind and I would be struck by these many potential expressions of their fusion. It might seem strange but at the time I was fascinated by the imagery of the Eurasian Steppe, of this great and once eternal seeming grassland from where the Yamnaya and their descendants came down to conquer the known world at the beginning of history. Followed in turn later by the Scythians, the Sarmatians, the Huns, the Magyars, the Mongols and even the Turks.
The romance of it, the beauty of that unbelievably harsh and cruel environment, I really did find myself thinking about it constantly. I would walk through the field of the park with my arms stretched out to either side and imagine myself there. I’ve always been drawn to wide open spaces, only in totally open places does my soul feel completely free to assert itself, to fill out fully. There’s this wide road I used to walk along during the last year of school (I still go past that way from time to time) in the morning and I really enjoyed walking right up and along the middle of the road when it wasn’t too busy with cars. I’d love to see true open land one day, in Mongolia or Southern Russia or wherever, though it’s neither cheap nor especially safe.
This kind of imagery was a major feature of these artistic potentials that would float into my mind that I was talking about earlier, that very example I gave certainly had it. On one other walk a little earlier than the one in November I just mentioned, instead of a work of visual and audial art I began to feel a few lines of poetry forming from that same creative source. I didn’t write them down at the time, because while in that zone I really liked how they sounded to me, I know I’m no poet. I’ve talked before about my failure to understand or appreciate poetry, and so for those reasons I abandoned the idea as I did with all the others when leaving the park. The lines never left my mind though, I couldn’t get rid of them.
From Éire to Indus and every inbetween
There lived Gods and many kings
Riding down from the great grass sea
They weren’t even the first lines of a potential poem, and there were more that I did forget, they were just lines that felt poetic to me that I could see being somehow worked into something coherent one day. Grandiose ideas never last long though, especially those that are conjured up in this park I noticed after a time. So I kind of forgot about it, the idea of the poem was what I’d been fantasising about on that day just as the idea of other kinds of art were on my other strolls, rather than the pure expression of the lines themselves. So I let the lines remain somewhere in my mind, but had effectively let them go.
Then my visits to the park stopped, it didn’t snow this year and so the park in the dead of winter really lost a lot of that beauty I saw in it during Autumn without evolving to express a new kind as I had hoped for. I actually found a different park, also quite nearby, which I began visiting instead. The last few months though, since coming home from my trip to Rome, I’ve not really been visiting any of the parks. I’ve been working a lot, and I just haven’t been enjoying the walks as I once did, so on my days off I’ve been doing what I used to do and just staying indoors all day. The weather is warming though, and I’m going to have a lot more time on my hands going forward, so I do intend to start going again in the coming months.
As you may have heard, there’s a bit of a bug going around at the moment. My boss wanted to stay open despite it, and so I was working last week, but this weekend he announced to the team that we will be closing temporarily. Probably for the next 12 weeks, but it’s open to change. The government has instituted a temporary kind of UBI, so I’m still getting paid 80% of what I was, but I am effectively a NEET again. On the one hand it is an opportunity to read a lot, and write a lot more, but tedium does have a dulling effect on my spirit so I am a little concerned about this. I was an actual NEET for about half a year before getting this job and that really started to get to me, but I didn’t have an outlet like this back then.
Are we living in the end times? No, I don’t believe so. I was reading the Wikipedia article on the smug french imp known as Voltaire the other day and somewhere in there (or maybe in one of the linked articles about a particular work of his, clearly I was just ‘pedia surfing that day) it is mentioned that there was a smallpox outbreak in Paris during his lifetime that killed 20,000 people. I found myself stumbling across this information to be rather timely, given the major news story of the day, and it made me think. Corona-Chan – Gaia’s latest vengeful aspect – has actually been rendered rather impotent by the selfsame superstructure which roused her in the first place.
The initial outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan began before I left for my trip to Italy in early February, and there were cases in the north of the country while I was there if I remember correctly. Given how badly the country is affected, it has the most declared deaths I believe, I was pretty lucky. Always one step ahead of the game. I remember talking about it with my co-workers the night we went out a week before I left, joking about it actually. It has been about three months since the first cases appeared, and the death count worldwide is at about half of that 20,000 in Paris alone that died in the 1700s. Yet all around me people are acting as if the world is burning, you can definitely smell the fear in the air. That or acting as if nothing has changed at all, I’ve noticed.
I noticed customers last week shaking while paying for things, showing an unsual consideration for how I’m doing, or just a nervousness in their voice. I’m not saying there’s not cause for concern, but the way people are acting is just pathetic. Fighting over dried food that will be restocked the next day, stealing from shopping carts, hoarding. I am not saying that this couldn’t potentially kill a lot of people, but it hasn’t yet unless the conspiracy theories about the CCP lying about the numbers of dead in China are true. I saw a pretty interesting thread on /pol/ the other day about a very sudden and drastic increase in cancelled SIM cards in China that coincides with the timeline of this outbreak. I remain sceptical though, it does seem like this thing will blow over without having done too much damage.
Think about how incredibly unlikely it is that 20,000 people in a single city, as didn’t just happen in Paris but became nothing more than a historical footnote. It’s not even mentioned in this article documenting the history of the city in the 18th century, In fact given how much smaller the population of an average city, even a European capital, was during that period of time, an equivalent percentage of people dying now would be far higher than 20,000, somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. I just think it’s beneficial to take a step back and get some perspective. Though of course also take the sensible and necessary precautions, or don’t whatever. Maybe the reason I’m really so unaffected by this is because I don’t really care if hundreds of thousands of people die from this anyway.
It might sound cold of me, but I don’t have too much sympathy for normalfags. The only people I hope (or even simply care) remain safe through this thing are the people who care about me, and my care is proportionate to theirs. It is purely reciprocal. My co-workers seem to care slightly, so I in turn wish them the best even the girl who I was calling oneitis a few months ago. I’m actually quite surprised how little I care that I’m not going to see her for possibly three months, given how upset I was about not seeing her for only one this last winter. I guess she’s not my oneitis anymore, I’m not sure why but my feelings have just faded. I’ve just been wanting to get away from people lately, good timing I suppose.
So a few weeks ago I was still at work, I was working until late last week actually the quarantine officially began on Monday, and stuck there all afternoon and evening with nothing to do but away from my laptop at home so unable to write. For most days of the week as well which is why I’ve been uploading rather infrequently lately. One day there I was sitting down and I was reminded of those few lines from months before. So I took out a notebook from my bag, and began to write.
From Éire to Indus And every inbetween There lived gods And many kings
Rolling down from The great grass sea Long haired heroes Bronze clad steeds
Now only the high Walls of once cities
I stopped there, it wasn’t good at all. There’s no structure to this mess, it is rooted in nothing. Nowadays everyone can be a poet, an instapoet if you want. You can string a few sentimental sentences together, cut them to pieces arbitrarily and if you pair your product with a picture of a pretty girl’s face then you’ll receive all the adulation you could desire as a “Creative”. Yet is there any value to it, it’s all a sham. Compliments are a sham, a lot of the time. I showed the written above section to someone, and she told me it was “great, you should try and get published!!”. What a joke, it is structureless and soulless. I scribbled it up in a few minutes, it flowed from my pen like prose.
Poetry is structure, it is rigidity that gives it it’s freedom, even I know this and I find little pleasure in reading poetry. It’s greatness comes from construction, the greatest poets of history didn’t just shit out fully formed works they laboured to produce their works. Even those iconoclastic avant-gardists of the modernist period like Ezra Pound who threw out strict meter did so not to open poetry to the world, to allow any fool’s ink to be held in as high regard as that of a master craftsman’s. They had their reasons I suppose, you’d have to ask someone who knows a thing about literature to explain precisely what, but they came from a place of knowledge. Think of the phrase “you need to learn the rules in order to break them”.
A few weeks ago I finally found the courage to fall for the online dating meme. I know how those sites work, Chad Thundercock uses it like an in-store catalogue, everyone else shouldn’t bother, but I’m lonely and my pride hurts for having remained so this long and so I did. The whole process is humiliating, taking a photo of yourself because you haven’t got any candid ones because you’re a fucking loser with no friends is humiliating, having to advertise yourself like a disposable product is humiliating, answering the asinine questions that no one ever looks at your answers for anyway because they “swipe” after seeing your first photo is humiliating. Taking a “selfie” for the first time felt like a nu-male rite of passage, I have become a bugman.
Somehow, I did manage to match with two qt3.14s. I think because when you make a new account they promote your profile to as many people as possible, then after a few days they bury it unless you’re Chad so you’re incentivised to pay for exposure. Or something like that, there are definitely some shady practices going on. You’re getting taken for a ride boys. I chose an app called Bumble, rather than Tinder because it has this gimmick where women always have to message first which allowed me to avoid the final humiliation of coming up with a funny enough opening line to snatch her attention away from the ten Chads she’s chatting with briefly.
It was one of these two girls who complimented my “””poem””” as relayed above, that’s why I’m mentioning this. It just rang so hollow to me that I couldn’t help but resent her deeply for it, all her false enthusiasm. She was really enthusiastic at first, though it felt so fake to me. I remember waking up, she must have matched with me during the night, and there was a message from her. She wanted to text back and forth the whole day and after a while I was really starting to feel like I’d made a terrible mistake. I tried replying with shorter and shorter messages to get her to back off a bit but that had the opposite effect, so that evening (the day after I first downloaded the app) I just asked her if she wanted to meet. My thinking was maybe after that she’d be satisfied and leave me alone a bit.
Which she was very happy about it seemed, asking me why I hadn’t just asked her earlier that day. Maybe if you hadn’t been constantly making it impossible to broach the subject roastie! She did back off a bit after that though, and the next day I decided to stop being such a bitter fag and embrace the situation. This is what I wanted right, to find a pretty girl who seemed to be interested in me? So I decided to reciprocate her enthusiasm when we picked the conversation back up. She wanted to know what I do for fun, I said I write quite a lot, before realising that there’s no way in hell I could share this blog with her. So when asked for examples I shared that stupid non-poem which this blog entry is meant to really be about.
Throughout the day, I noticed her interest seemed to lessen inversely with mine which actually increased as the day went on and I began to enjoy the text conversation. We made proper plans for meeting a couple days after that, I’ve never been on a “date” before so I let her decide and plan what to do. The day after she replied far less, and then the day before we were meant to meet she sent me one message very early then didn’t reply to my reply until that evening. I woke up the day we were meant to meet, and she had “unmatched” me. And while I was offended by the rudeness of it, wouldn’t it have been better to just tell me she’d lost interest, I found that I was also very pleased.
There was this dread about the meeting that was immediately lifted. Not just because there was that resentment I couldn’t get rid of even though she was quite nice, maybe just something I’d have with any female after years of being alone and bitter. Because I was just expecting an incredibly awkward experience and I knew I’d hate it. It’s funny though isn’t it, when I was slightly disinterested and also talking to another girl (who both matched with me and then stopped bothering to reply the same first day) she was very interested, and then the more I made an effort the faster she lost that interest. Maybe the PUA’s are actually onto something, what a crazy world. So after finding out what happened I noticed myself going back to swiping almost unthinkingly.
I stopped myself though, and in a moment of disgust at how quickly this thing had hooked me into it’s consumer cycle I deleted the app. Half a week after first downloading it. I remember thinking in that moment how sickened my ancient ancestors; barbarians, warriors, even any priestly or learned men if there were any; would be to see me there. I saw myself; pathetic, soft, modern creature in my pyjamas. And I saw these ancient men who those very lines from my failed poem brought to mind, the kind of men who put their enemies to the sword and razed cities to the ground. How would they see modern “man”, who prostrates himself so on these apps, who puts himself up for auction, who lives only for validation from women. I deleted the app, and in that moment vowed – I’m serious – that as penance I would take those lines and produce something that I could at least call a poem.
The immediate problem of course, was I didn’t know anything about poetry. I still don’t really. I remember what little I learned in school, English poetry is about stress. Feet, that is groupings of syllables which are repeated in a line a set number of times, in English (and I think most other languages throughout the world) are differentiated by which syllables within are stressed or unstressed. You’ll notice when you speak, at least in English but again many other languages as well, that you emphasise some syllables in a sentence very strongly but others you’ll just naturally glide across more softly. The same syllable in a word might be unstressed or stressed depending on the words surrounding it the particular sentence as well, it’s not always the same from what I understand.
A particular kind of poetic line then, is named based on the foot that is repeated and the number of said feet. I remember being taught that iambic pentameter is the standard poetic form in English, it’s what Shakespeare wrote in they told us. An iamb is a two syllable foot, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, it is supposed to sound like the beat of the human heart. da DUM, da DUM, da DUM. Repeated twice would be bimeter, thrice trimeter, four times tetrameter, and so on. You can find a list for the many different feet and all their names online, but it’s not going to help you if like me you just have a terrible ear for this sort of thing.
Maybe it’s a result of being such a thoroughly modern city dweller, maybe being so detached from the country and the earth has also alienated me from my body’s own natural rhythms. I remember the first day at work where I decided to really work on this thing, I decided I’d stick with the longer version of the starting line and analyse that. I then planned to use that as a model to repeat for the rest of the them, which at this point I had very little material for in preparation. I wrote down the line, and repeated it out loud to myself.
From Éire to Indus and every inbetween
Now it actually by chance seems to have a good natural rhythm to it, the muse must have been speaking through me when that line first came to me. It seems to very easily break up into four feet of three syllables each, so a kind of tetrameter. Yet despite reading it over and over to myself, in my head and out loud, and I just couldn’t quite figure out where the stressed syllables were in each foot. At first I thought the middle syllable on each one sounded best, but something about it sounded stilted and unnatural to me.
The last foot in the sequence just sounded completely wrong even to my untrained ear, and so I had to accept that that one would end with the stressed syllable rather than having it in the middle. This is fine though, one slightly different kind of foot (a substitutive) is generally acceptable even by older more rigid standards. In fact if done well, for example if used to break up the flow for deliberate effect, it improves the poem. Of course in my case it wasn’t for effect, although I did like that it gave the line a masculine ending. A line which ends on an unstressed syllable is referred to as feminine, and of course a stressed final syllable makes for a so called masculine ending.
From Éire / to Indus / and every (pronounced ev’ry) / inbetween
Given the subject of my poem, the harsh land of the steppe and the men and cultures it produced which have all been very strictly patriarchal I thought that was actually rather appropriate. I was now beginning to develop a real vision for the structure and layout of this thing, it was actually coming together. So at this point my thinking was that I’d try to end every line with one of those feet which has the stressed syllable on the end, an anapaest it’s called, and the first three feet would follow the unstressed – stressed – unstressed pattern referred to as an amphibrach.
An amphibrach is, according to wikipedia, mostly used in children’s poetry and more jovial or humorous kinds of poems. It is a kind often found in limericks, Dr Seuss wrote a lot with them I read somewhere, you get the idea. Given the tone of the poem I was trying to write that wasn’t ideal, my goal wasn’t a funny nursery rhyme clearly, but by this point I really liked the three syllable idea and that was where I felt the stresses were so I didn’t have much choice. It sounded right, and so I decided to just keep it. Not only did that first line just break into feet of three very naturally, but there was a rather appropriate symbolism to it as well.
The number three had a lot of significance to the Proto-Indo-Europeans, their social hierarchy was structured in a rigid three caste system. You can still see the echoes of it later in history; from the priest, knight, peasant social order of feudal Europe to the Hindu caste system which has it’s origin in the Vedic period though of course has evolved into something more complex. There is also more religious significance to it if you look into the subject further. There seems to have been some kind of division of the soul into a tripartite structure which their society must have seemed to mirror. With this in mind, I decided to work on developing the second line with what I already had.
It took me a lot longer than I’m proud to admit honestly, more than a couple hours, but after a few hours of fiddling around with what else I had I managed to produce two more lines which I thought conformed to that same amphibrachic tetrameter structure. To give myself some credit I was being interrupted by customers that whole time.
Old gods did / dwell, living / , and many / noble kings.
They came roll / ing down from / the once great / grass sea, on
As you can tell the third line there leads right into a fourth line, it’s enjambed. Perhaps because I’m just a brainlet, or perhaps because I’m good at sniffing out a fraud, most of the time I see enjambment used (particularly in contemporary free verse poetry from amateurs, instapoetry, most of the stuff that gets posted in critique threads on /lit/, etc.) it just seems arbitrary as I’ve said before. I’m never able to discern any kind of purpose or reason behind it, and there’s no strict metrical structure that makes it necessary, it just seems superficial. I was constricted by meter however, and so my hand was forced. I did plan at first to have all the lines end stopped, almost as a statement of protest towards the poseurs.
I had the general idea for the fourth line already in my mind at this point of course, just not the final product, it was going to be a variation on the “long haired heroes” line from before. I knew I had to keep that particular phrasing because I liked how it serves as an unintentional reference to Homer’s famous phrasing “long-haired Achaeans”; and also a structure for the overall poem was beginning to form in my mind which had eight lines which were paired. Eight lines, paired together in twos, kind of like a certain highly important Indo-European symbol which has an unfortunate reputation due to recent historical events…
See, in writing that second pair of lines – it would have been more impressive if I could’ve made them rhyme but unfortunately that was too difficult a task for me – which are obviously describing a kind of warrior aristocracy, it once again reminded me of the tripartite hierarchy of the Indo-Europeans I was mentioning a moment ago. The first two lines served as an introduction to this ancient world, the second clearly referenced a group of Kshatriya/ Knightly types, so now I knew what to write about for the rest of the poem. So the next quiet work shift I had, I got to work, and the writing the rest of the poem actually only took a couple more hours.
Their chari / ots, clad in / bronze, those long / haired heroes.
The many / , the most, both / their own and / those foreign
Did stand in / true awe be / fore their sub / limity;
Yet contact / with such a / thing as di / vinity
Could only / by souls ranked / most highly / be achieved.
So there it is, I’ll post it all together at the bottom of this post if you’re interested in reading it in it’s final form. I know it’s still not very good, I feel like the second half doesn’t have the same natural flow that the first few lines do. I worry that it sounds contrived at a few points in the second half trying to stick to the specific stress pattern from the start. It works “ok”, when reciting the poem you quite easily fit every line into the pattern set by the first, but when I look at some of the later lines on their own I’m not sure if that is the most natural way to speak them. I can’t think of a good title, so I’m leaving it without one for now. Thanks for reading.
From Éire to Indus and every inbetween Old gods did dwell, living, and many noble kings
They came rolling down from the once great grass sea, on Their chariots, clad in bronze, those long-haired heroes.
The many, the most, both their own and those foreign Did stand in true awe before their sublimity;
Yet contact with such a thing as divinity Could only by souls ranked most highly be achieved.
Ramblings of a neurotic mess 