Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Notes from the Void

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Writing to stay calm rather than go into the trance. Here's a new voice which wants to connect new parts of the self which are struggling to speak. You wouldn't say that this is a self which has never opened its mouth at all. I wonder whether it's worth it to go back and unravel those autistic poems, attempts at mystification which described a persona which didn't exist except in those moments where a flight of fancy could exist. This self has spoken before, but not with authority. The panic attacks also serve to create the state in which electricity is felt coursing through the system with Bradshaw's toxic shame. But in seeking to write out of calm, there's a new encounter in the making, one seeking balance rather than the disjunct. The fragmentary parts of sentences which jumble out without reason or connection describe a state in which a hypnotic trance-dance disallows completion of juncture, disallows penetration to a core of being which is calming and recognized rather than, must I say, a false persona, an impostor. So in the attempt to integrate myself, I move my hand across the page in this attempt to communicate, not mystify, and this is new.

Suddenly (perhaps not so) I am looking back at an old style and thinking about it. The book tells me to go ahead and not look back. Can I do it? Holding on only creates tension, or a state which was there before, reinforcing its run-on go-comma go-comma style. Coma. That was the word for it. After an episode of writing, there would be a numb stasis I confused with safety. Writing should take you out and connect you to the sun, the moon, the outside; in the run-on, free association style, an area is defined, but it is not a world that leaves you out there. It is the internalized robot world we won't dwell on right now. Pages of it. Look at the serene, why not make that choice? What's so shocking, you might say, about that style is how it charges the persona with false energy. In the integrated connectedness of writing which climbs out of an inner necessity, there is no longer a turning away, but rather, a sense of safety and focus which themselves are ameliorative, and which remember. That's a clue. In not remembering the present and in creating toxic shock in my descriptions, I found myself not wanting, but somehow trapped in what I had made.


I

Everything emanates from the void.
The higher power resides there.
The external world of objects
comes out of the void,
cornucopia of things seen
have their origins there.

Comfort also comes out of dark
Light originates out of darkness
The void is paradoxically full

It's not your pain
It's her pain
& she's gone

Everyone is in the void
& the void is in everything
the space between words

II

It's your voice out there
whispering over the wires
I love you.

Here the pain recedes, does not
return. Singing with men
and a pipe and this
all return me.

Be here now
It's not your pain

and tonight I sang to him
for half an hour, soothing
my heart with a song to
God & Little Tommy--it's all right
and a song to you
now and near in my heart

III

Day's morning calm
calls out from where I am
inside me easing;
soothing senses say to hold
and grow into the light

at God's own kingdom
there are these worlds from
inside again, the easing
of a door becalms,
a window from which
light emanates

and I move toward it
from where I am today
saying here, and this.

Release me, doubt, and
call a prayer my own light

which stays within and
flows forward.

IV

Turning it over.
I join the seamless web
where I am already.

some things are put away,
contained, to be drawn upon
when required.

What is required? Being appropriate
to the moment. seeing

I call out to God to take
these moments and let me
see my unfolding, the Bloom.

Where there was a rose,
now there is a tree, beginning
to become

And here the water continues
And here the light begins
and ends and continues

March 19, 1994