A verbis ad verbera.

A Confounded Letter about what I think. About opposites.

 

Ah look, you; a demisted daisy mint morning that you sometime see as well as I. See the folded shadow silks across these landscape tables and virgin crossed daylight lines. Watch the landscape of coloured stones lean into history and spread their legends across myriads of belief and green old wives tales.

See gestalt continental maps in the coats of these comfortable grazing animals. View cold myth and hot dragon in the web limit limbs that brush across your once perfect, raised to the wind, face. Catch soft the sphere of the coming sun, risen beyond a gently domed bruised eye line. Find movement in all the coloured ranges of sight, closing, coming together, falling gently apart, riding whole, lovingly clutching and completing. See everything fit perfectly into a general precise theory of correspondences. This is true magic. This is where the ghosts live.

Listen to the music of this female valley, hear the trumpets of its soft round mountains. Sing the roar of its waters finally kissing you awake. Love its deepest crevice and fall into it as something forbidden. Risk all because you can understand this moment as a sacred blessed song. Allow specific gravity to explore your wishes and for what you will understand. Let your sight not follow but exchange and change what it watches. Find the second sight for what it is and use it.

Spread thick and insistent across your dangerous bohemian eye this view and this sound. Serve only your own purpose and truly look. Observe and understand. Draw. Demand your true attention to all these jewelled memories that will only fail because you finally wish them to.

You can see, really see, you see, no more. You can look at nothing. It is not possible now to draw the skeletal lines a priori or smudge the organic tones out of your body.

It is gone, lost in clockwork steam valved revelations and pumping machine hearts. Forgotten in blown glass menagerie thoughts and techno religious revelations. The dark glasses in a graveyard. Staked out on greasy industrial plains and naked soulless, toneless polluted deadscapes.

Sing this as your mantra now. It is what is correct for your right hand mind. You are right. Follow the temporal mathematics of the true new faith in the sickly occasional green and not so now pleasant land. You are allowed no other path to ultimately succeed in your rampant enthusiasm.  Allow no turgid water hypnotising of the senses. Read this agreed tract or be deemed unalive, souldead vampire of the countries formatted vision.

This is the profit of true modern paper folded dogma. A feeling of being hardy yet  together and ultimately useful. Allow no womanly love to enter your inner senses. Keep your right to be right. Your will to be wrong. Agree to nothing, not even this description of yourself. Say give it urgently rather than take it slowly and with reverence. Allow only Scylla and Charybdis sensing and know they are what keep you whole. Listen only to the dead world words of one and keep the other in sight. Avoid both. Keep yourself as pure as the oil in the machine. The monsters are still twinned, remember that. A versis ad verbera..

Author's Note

Trans: From words to blows.
The picture is mine and called A Fantasy on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

Reviews

[Greg the Bard]

My mind is sometimes very much slower than I can read. It makes for a need for quick to the point writing, of which this is not. This does not mean that the work is not aluring but as a good friend of mine once said of Will Shakespear, "I can't understand a thing he said but boy does he have a great way of saying it". I wonder if this is a story about the coming of Vampires or the view from Constatine just before he paints a Oil painting of the local country side. Is the image great it goes without saying but is it one long sentence that will never end I think it has that type of air. I will follow this work with great interest. Thanks for the wonderful write.

[...]

When nature speaks through an open heart that listens, it takes my breath away...

[Donald Meikle]

Delved in again mate and it was still you laughing at me

[Ken Simm.]

I would never so that Donald. You are one of my heroes.

[roarke]

Stunning photo Ken, what a capture, the light breath taking combined with the bird frozen in flight. As I read your confoundedness... I related how when I walk through our forest, during any season, the purity of nature both cleanses you and clears the glass of observation at the same time so you can see/realize contrasts that in any other setting would be disguised or blurred. The starkness of this contrast can be upsetting or inspiring depending upon the mood. As you suggest here, let nature win in setting your mood. Great write.

[Ken Simm.]

Thank you so much for the those words my friend. I am honoured you like both image and writing.

[Rogue]

This is a wonderfully descriptive juxtaposition on the natural state vs the mechanical state.
There is beauty in both for those that would look... The graceful lines of land and the symetry of the moving machines...
Always a treat reading you, Ken. :)

[Ken Simm.]

It was an attempt to pt over that we cannot see what we've lived with and loved because of what we've created to love. You write the most illuminating reviews Rogue.

[Rogue]

I understand what you meant, Ken. I originally went to write up a review here on the difference in generations and where our overall appreciation of nature comes from (our parents basically threw us out on non school days, from sunrise until dinner) Of course we know what dirt, sand, mud, rusty things, at least five different types of rock, various leaves, tree bark, brackish water, insects, worms, fish scales and on and on... Not only looks and feels like, but what it all tastes like as well... Why were we sticking these things in our mouths, Ken? (That's a whole other subject) I was lucky if I saw an hour of TV a day before I was a teenager. We weren't allowed to just hang out in the house unless it was sub zero temperatures or a major thunder storm.
I was media whipped by the time I had kids. Don't let them out of my sight, somebody might steal one. Don't let them out of the yard alone before they were nine, somebody might steal one. Only ride your bikes on the sidewalk in front of the house (somebody might steal you or you'll get hit by a car). See what I mean? They were raised in homes with central heat and air. If it was over 80 degrees outside and they started to sweat, they ran for the indoors. And why not? They had every gaming system out and each updated version as it appeared on the market, several tv's to watch all loaded down with 100 or more channels, computer, etc... Nature? Pfft. These beings never wanted to leave the house.
So where we had the trees, bugs, grass, weeds, rocks etc... to comfort us, they had machines. Mine are all adults now and their true joy and happiness still comes from them. These particular children were raised in a beach and ocean out their back door environment. I can only imagine how they might be if they had been raised in the middle of a city.
Okay... Those were my original thoughts.
-grin-
I find many of your topics quite interesting and if I am not careful I could end up writing you reviews that Tolstoy would envy for their sheer size. :P

[Marri]

For me, mountains are grandiose and intimidating, and strangely your voice has always contained their greatness, deep, profound and echoing mysteries. This voice is a style for you and you never disappoint or hit lower your own bar.... your stories (because indeed they are full-blooded stories!), are always accompanied by magnificent photography, but also by that voice that breaths out mountains and splits histories and breaks the tectonic clefts of time and is as calming as dramatic...which makes me think that no matter where you point your lens, you capture the story with that manner and that voice that has something to do with honey and an oak and a peak in the midst of clouds. Which just confirms my belief that writing is a talent that envelopes ideas not merely report them...what I read here for me is writing's mastery and any idea would be honoured to be expressed so.....

[Ken Simm.]

As I am honoured to receive such a review Marri. In fact you honour me to much with those lovely words.

[Marri]

Being honoured is mutual, reader's privilege

[Leslie Philibert]

Another excellent piece, full of richness and a fantastic vocabulary, gestalt, demisted,Ken knows how to put original words into original themes. Like the use of Latin, the pace of the text, the paragraphing - excellent. ( I`m not sure, but didn`t Thomas Tallis write excellent Elisabethan music ? I`ll google that...) Nice one.

[Ken Simm.]

The picture is named after a piece by Vaughn Williams clled Fantasia on a piece by Thomas Tallis. Tallis himself was working during the regin and at the court of Henry VIII. I like the richness comment. That is what I was aiming for Thank you Leslie.

[r. f. jordan]

"Watch the landscape of coloured stones lean into history and spread their legends across myriads of belief and green old wives tales."; "Allow only Scylla and Charybdis sensing and know they are what keep you whole. Listen only to the dead world words of one and keep the other in sight. Avoid both. Keep yourself as pure as the oil in the machine. The monsters are still twinned, remember that. A versis ad verbera.." this piece contains much inter-textual shading, and is command in tone to the point of near-omniscience. i often get the sense, as i read your speaker, that i have no idea where a sentence is going to wind up once it begins. keep the contemplation of opposites going, it is good work.

[cartera]

A whirlpool of words that siren-like carry the reader into feeling that she/he is seated at the feet of a mystic. After giving the reader the injunction to be aware of the oneness and beauty of the world, the writer/guru then admonishes and warns that this wonderful world has traps that await to show that the scenic, sentient wonderland may only be on the surface. Beware Corryvechan. Keep ypourself pure. Is there a Calvinist lurking in here somewhere?
Poetic stuff, elegantly written.

[...]

. the photograph is stunning ... and so is this piece ... the contrast between the first part and the second part is startling ... i found the following lines very insightful and revealing ...

"Allow no womanly love to enter your inner senses. Keep your right to be right. Your will to be wrong. Agree to nothing, not even this description of yourself. Say give it urgently rather than take it slowly and with reverence."

. i know someone who thinks like that but i could neither comprehend that nor articulate it ... i'm actually very surprised that i came across these words today ... when i was looking for answers ... these lines here have many ... at least for me ... i now know what the other side thinks ... thank you for this post ...

[roarke]

Great picture, huge scope, subtle power. Everything works there.

The write, rich and artistic, the cerebral landscapes of illumination. You balance a rich texture with a rhythm of thought.

I see in the second part, a kind of tone of accusation, a reprimand of a sort and then a caution.
An interesting contrast to the insight and enlightened enjoyment of the pastoral beauty of life and creativity preceding it.

A true melding of art and intellect. Well done.