so, how long is a piece of string?
always somehow, and ever somewhere,
in a thousand different ways and
a thousand different times, I set myself up,
I set my self up
to be the clever one, to be right in the end, and inevitably,
like a thousand different echoes,
someone comes and stands
right in my way, or kneels in a ball behind me while someone else
shoves me backwards
so that I fall like a prat, and then someone else points
and says ‘ha; ha’ in a thousand different ways; where
do they all come from,
do they just shimmer out of nowhere
like ghosts just to frustrate me –whooo!–
do they come out of nature,
naturally unjust, naturally evil; are they just there
existing from their own side, like a sharp bend in a long stretch of road
{oh, come on,
no, they’d have to pre-exist in order to
come into existence, which would involve
a change in something which cannot change
because it is pre-existent, and therefore
causeless, so that it would have to stop being what it is
in order to be what it isn’t,
you know that, don’t you}; no, everything
is conditioned, yes, and nothing stands
independent by itself, so everything
I have ever done or said or thought
has been conditioned already, ok, but also,
everything I have ever done or said
or thought has also set up a
whole web of further conditions
which have had, or are nail-tapping waiting to have,
an impact on other events
and people; and yes, that’s ‘me’ in the corner …:
the endless twists and turns I have made,
and still making with every move and word and thought,
which bind me in, tightly or loosely,
to everything with which I interact –
completely and utterly tangled:
I hope I acted cleanly and carefully,
but I’m afraid I didn’t – I’m … going to have to face my
whole knot – a universally big ball,
so much bigger than l’il ole me
that it doesn’t seem to have much to do with me, but it does,
it, all, does;
and I’d better stop pulling and tugging away at it
to get my own way and
start untangling, and start untangling …
…I had a tangle of garden-wire to sort today; it had been wound round a dispenser but some of it had crossed over, become entangled, yanked, and a whole middle section had come away; then it had been worked on, to untangle it, but impatiently, and without thought, and so whole rolls of it had become furled over and through themselves, some bits were knotted, some bits were hanging out in great loops; being garden-wire, it kinked where it had been bent which also caught other strands as they came close to them in their tangle; and it had been cut for a quick solution, and so I had more than two ends that I could make any sense of; it took time untangling it, it took willing to give up on some progress I had already made on seeing that I’d started too far in, or too peripherally; it meant keeping hold of the thread I was starting with and turning the whole tangle around it, rather than working through the tangle, knowing that I was making problems for myself further down the line but I couldn’t worry about that yet; it meant having to abandon my initial thread sometimes to concentrate on further-on loops before I could return to it released; it meant I had to think ahead a bit to loosen the tangle in all the ways that it would, even if it meant unravelling the newly-wound initial thread I’d already sorted, a little; I had to take a rest every once in a while because I was concentrating too tightly …
no, these enemies they’ve
been ‘here’ all along, right in the
back of my head, long forgotten,
but from the time I crossed them
in a thousand different ways
and a thousand different times,
they’ve been waiting, relentlessly,
for a body and a circumstance to come together
to respond:
“there you go, mate, I owed you that”
and inexorably I’d been setting myself up with just the right conditions
to receive it
Bodhisattvacharyavatara chapter VI, verse 47: Impelled by my actions – [drawn out by circumstance, incited by the heat of the moment, prompted by hearsay, provoked by trigger, instigated by design, mobilised by obligation, shoved by control, summoned by role] – those who cross or hurt me, those who do me wrong just appear, right in my way and do what they have to do. And because of their actions, they will end up fallen and consigned to the infernal realms … surely, isn’t it actually me who have destroyed and damned them, haven’t I just been the mirror to magnify back to them their harm?
and, yes, that is a reference to the REM song, losing … something
————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–
being & mind wormhole: …zzh-vvttP*–… … …
change wormhole: on facing the Have
doing & speech wormhole: ‘ouch’
echo wormhole: St. Erasmus in Bishop Islip’s Chapels, 1796
ghosts wormhole: what wounds have you got?
identity & others wormhole: there will be ovations
practice wormhole: ‘there, …’
samsara wormhole: glamour of saṃsāra
talking to myself wormhole: SPRING AND ALL VI by William Carlos Williams
thought wormhole: horizon
