The Complete Confounded Letters, plus a new one.

This last week up a mountain. Confounded Letter 1

The experimental jet screamed into the clouds across the mountains.
I painted you into the landscape from memory
From on high I watched the ghost of a friend walk across the end of the silvered loch
I climbed the black crag in the massacre glen
and I did not feel like coming down.

I lay in the sculpted snow on the crag summit
and found it so easy to fall asleep, saying no more is useful
the strings of an orchestra played through my ears in technology concerned with
losing the sound of aircraft booming.
The clouds gathered like ominous periwigs colluding in a court of old men

The old snow snapped beneath the weight of my stalking slowly
as rocking I peregrinated across a knife edge a thousand feet from anywhere
It darkened and began to snow.
My friends ghost walked with me for a while before giving in to temptation
and shouted murder the thousand foot drop to nowhere.

Clouds water fell down the mountain and blackbirds with red bills surf rode the edges
liquid choughing their chuckling sounds of high delight
There is a rock up there that belongs to me and is immortal
if it changes then so do I. It is still up there. You can see it from here usually.
I talked to your memory image and worked out why you do not wish to speak of love any more.
Because you have not been given permission by the feelings that rule.
But still I painted. And still I wondered from summit to foot.

Wind froze and carpet snow swirled, displaying and lifting its skirts for all to see.
I sweated beneath my waterproof. Eating was a hand full of cold snow mashed with dead flowers.
Drinking was the same. Ten year old mature single snow.
One booted footprint that could be today or Alpine Man Friday weeks ago but is not mine.
Drawing across the virgin on to the flat surface of the ridiculous and laughing at the stupid, suspect, play on words.
Phone beeped as jet returned and I could not hear the conversation. Wondered if it was you. Then decided it was not.
I scree jumped down. All the way down careless and unconcerned. Nothing that I wanted to happened. Even your landscape painting remained safe. The music in my ears roared louder until I stopped it.

Yesterday then was a criticism of mountains. Confounded Letter 2

I hid in a drawing I had done in my latest sketchbook
I made it so complex to infuriate and tease you. I then put it to the wall because I still have a problem with the criticism of mountains and talent that takes the place of all practise..

I then got a clicking message asking if I would like to review a board made of light.
You can draw with anything. From your toe in wet sand to a laser on the side of a mountain. Which is more devils honest? I wonder slightly terrified..
The sky is uninterrupted in its singing and the slopes have cloudy versions of themselves opening onto a proscenium.

The exhibition I intend having on my sleeve is coming on. But you already knew that. I was told I needed to retire. Teach only by example This was another message just before I missed my horse and walked the dogs along the glen to the Bothie.

Streams thundered snow melt and new flowers yawned. I imagined playing imaginary Pooh sticks under a fallen log on the upper falls as I did with them. Part of the hundred. Ah yes, the past is another country and its population is regret. It goes where the stick goes, tumbling along time cataracts and falls into memories..
I was asked what I wanted on my tombstone when talking about the ghost. I thought for a moment and then said, He Forgot, thankfully.

I felt like going up into the snow melt sunshine as the valley and my drawing became darker. The sun hid behind the hills. But if you move your position by even a hairsbreadth the whole concept of drawing changes. Draw what you see. Not what you think you see. This is the whole of the law. You must understand it to ignore it. Drawing is thinking in another language that is the opposite of temporal.

There is and was an arch of light above me and an eagle clasping a cliff side rock eyrie.
A steel blue flashing rescue crossed the bridge far, far below, where I cannot go and I clasped my drawing book to me as it got wet with large snow.

Wild goat and Stag bounded.

Long Ago and far away in a room of glass. Confounded Letter 3.

I remembered this as I watched the workmen fitting in a fibre glass mountain. Cutting the parts to intricate fit. I am intrigued beyond these and the fey pine tree telephones.
The old fuel pump down the road from where I sit today, thinking these things, is covered in spiders. Attracted by the colour? Or the excretions?

You were the first and the last and the same one in the cities and up the mountains. Cities do tire more than several thousand feet into the crags. Walking slowly where I said and wrote, like a heron a red heron she walked past the cenotaph, refusing politely. A minute in the life of the world is going by, said Cezanne, paint it as it is. Just yesterday morning Cezanne put an end to you.

Giants stalked the land then and the dark was like treacle. Loneliness that later I came to accept or even betimes, seek; was a small room with orange walls and a green wicker cabinet. Looking out across a clay pit and a 15th Century farmhouse with horse hair plaster walls and a civil war ghost cavalryman. I found his pistols in a priest hole.

We found a maze carved into a rock face and you read that the same one had been found in ancient Mesopotamia by a Victorian archaeologist. We read Scheherazade and Schopenhauer because of that.

You came to visit and you left my album of harp music on the doorstep and left without speaking. It was 28 years before I saw you again. You criticised constantly. I was diagnosed as suffering from your criticism.

Now you are thousands and seven criticisms away and I don't know what to say. Apologies are for the initiated and the landscape of sorry is Bosch bedevilled and sealed hermetic written.

Once long ago and far away in the north, we watched people escaping a fire in Woolworth. We knew that some had died and we held hands closely because you were married. You had auburn hair and you became a model and I a teacher. And then you were a teacher and I made films. Then I sold trees and you looked after a gallery. Where we met.

This is about, you and you and of course you, finger pointing and shaking. When we met and fought and eventually fell. Long ago and far away yesterday and here. We are platonic lovers and we always have been however old our souls are.
Leave me messages and say good morning. Leave me notes and say goodnight as we go to our separate beds in our wondered rooms of glass.

Last Year was Halcyon, perhaps. Confounded letter 4.
Last year

It was first of all a kingfisher, halcyon fishing bird from my foot. The bird that left the ark second and flew upwards to take the colour of the sky before turning and the sun burning breast feathers, russet.

Last year was painting again in the dark when you came and went, came and went, like the seventh wave.

Painted mountains were giants shouting in the distance as I drove towards them and looked forward to being lonely. Skies were lidless and shiny. Eyes were bright and places were wet.

Cantering on my chestnut missing the tide was everyday last year and I was happy to give up whisky and I finally let the dog dreams of chasing on my favourite chair whilst I planned paintings.

Last year I saw the Isle of the Silver Otter and smelled instinctively the memory brine on the rockward side of the loch. Collected stones were kept in medicine jars along with small thoughts of dominance.

Sunrise was filled with gulls crying and clamouring like children for wistfulness, followed by sandwich short days of nothing much as bladderwrack popped and crabs scuttled clack. And last was sunset brush stroked, feathered and intended.

Last time, last year was heartbeat running through the grove of large pines whilst listening to baroque counter beat. My new running shoes hurt my feet for a while. Just as my old thinking warned and warmed me.

Lonely can be in a crowd and crowded can be all alone with oneself. Several people said this to me.

Progressive rock and fantasy were still favourites and work began selling. Last year the dog otter cracked his food on a rock below my watercolour and I showed him first of all to a new interest .

Gorgeous was painted from you and entered in an eye competition and I sailed around the islands to the sound of you loving. Don't go away, you said and how will I know, you questioned? But you did and so did I, last year.

So consider learning about the birds in the winding gear of Lancashire. Confounded Letter 5.

Me walking through the tall grass of childhood with wet feet. Considering this.
Two short eared owls flying low out of the snow mist across the brick making clay pit. Double barbed feathered wings silent. This is no accident.
The Steppes of Central Asia, Borodin was favourite for dreaming and conjuring on a mono radio. Listening to myself when jumping down the grey canal embankment was pleasure enough. Large barges drawn dragging by large horses silent too except for whip crack cold, calling feathered feet dragging from the pit head.
Coal shining contrasting snow. Rides into town with barges and back again with one friend dog on Saturday. Other friend left when he fell into a pit of coal dust mud and drowned with his snot nose.
Watching finally black and white wrestling and old men and boxes with small flickering.
Next door Mr Lawrenson was deaf and next door Mr Barker was bedridden and dead. He will not harm you even if his mouth opened his eyes and grave noises came gurgling up throat tunnels.
Dad drunken spitting, sprawling and bleeding heart attack eyes and rough whiskers against skin. Peeing forever into the outside wall pipe tin bath clanging below my window. Never stopping and coughing and beating. Because I heard what my Father was.
Mothering dropped half a crown on the floor and it hit her on the back of the neck. Mothering and sisters did not spend money except on themselves. All clan eight.
So around the coal pit slag heaps with an old bath pram squeaking collecting and running away from Uncle Bill who saved it .
Working in the greengrocers, for the witch bitch getting mice in my mouth and rats on my legs. And you don't know you are born for a pound a week. Stolen by Mothering always. But seeing the small tits of the girls in the boxes of cabbage.
Not down the pit or up to the mill. Education is a talisman. Why work with your hands when your brain will do better? Why work with your hand when you can draw it?
Dialect donkey work all that was left for all the others. And the winding gear is gone so we cannot see our way home. But learning is better alone.

There's a town called misery and of that we'll have none. Confounded Letter 6.

So sang the Bonzo's at Dog University. Words from this bloody bailiwick, ha, ha.
Pink elephants on a Dalek and two tone ghost music in the studios of the city. Friends that stoned died and of that we will have none. Its always lots of fun. But we did and it did not work. Ah, someone said, but is it art? It is if I say so said Duchamp amongst others. L.H.O.O.Q.

Now Bohemians were 19 weeks in a small television and love paint making was in an equally small, smelling of stale studio behind an Irish pub just before the centre city blew up and took them with it.
Policeman waking me in the small hours in a shop doorway. Told him I was waiting for the sale.

Famous Lovers Do, Party Art you see through do. A completely transparent three piece complete with extra underwear. Wiping up her vomit with a twenty pound note. Two from conscience in a single bed. The only thing worse than a drunken woman.
Showing playing happening we did, festivals we had, reviews from the Fine Art Rescue Team. Who played drawing darts and had legends on shirts.

We really like your painting, said the German tutor on his own. You can draw, he said. Not many can nowadays. Draw me a copy. I am here to be taught. So where are all the teachers? Love studentship. Fail and fail again to see the pointed question.

Sights from this bailiwick. Contained stupid and semen. Blow jobs and Blow up was fashionable. Loved and lost and not at all in their right minds.
Beautiful went missing for three years. Art went missing for a lot longer. Pity kitsch did not what it could should not allow. Ars longa bloody vita blessed brevis and not just putting rock back on the map. Avoiding pushing peeling plural pills but not forever and winging my way into your confident support, just before you left wearing my shirt. And the case he found in your flat could have only held a needle. But it did hold a pen and so I hit him on your behalf.
Listening to a very stirring sabre dance whilst missing a visually exciting scene, was the title of a friends portrait of me and mine and what was missing..
Sequential Quentin came and went, dear boy. On defining a life style. The band started and painted the murals.
K died and so did ill badly. In blue je 'taime encore rainbows of soft velvet and long hair shirts. I could tuck mine into my headband you know. Long and thick. The hair.
The thesis, was Apotheosis normally bestowed on younger artists by the higher echelons of the critical establishment. Long and thick, the thesis and meaning nothing. Like all those years of nonsense training to nonsense working and from that to nonsense marriages of foolish souls in already foolish studies.
When we all needed calm.

Now a loose conglomeration of pictures views in an exhibition. Confounded Letter 7.

Words falling away give enough rope to do the dirty and Mussorgsky plays. Picture light shafts in past 2001 and watercolour spills. You know what to do if you spill red wine on a carpet, say I? Draw the shape of a body around it so you have a murder to talk about with friends.
Why do people murder relationships? Re done relationships. Re cooked and slitted ox fat roasted into arguments that are never clear streams and never successful cataracts. Cooking is done when the juice runs clear.
Dream of my children. Dream as they were not as they are. Dream a little dream of me. Confusion kicks right into the solar plexus and takes the wind out of everybody sailing. The music flashes blue on the new machine and I paint in the conservatory. Being told not to get anything messy. This is the whole of the law according to whom? According to both the incumbents who thought it less important than the curtain material or the new kitchen. Pretty messy, pretty portraits, painting pretty.
Leave the second to their own devices. Go away to be alone and cosy in the highlands and this time make a mess like Francis Bacon's studio. He said he always does his women an injury with an axe.
A voice out of nowhere said once, read Odyssey. I presumed Homer not Joyce. I was wrong, Stephen Daedalus was the portrait and I was young.
I've noticed that we tend to forget what is unexplainable in our present paradigms. I took a girl down an old railway and a monster came out of the dark. It is only now that I realise that the monster was her projecting. A poltergeist of gestalt's, out from the woods.
I listed all my intangibles. What a bore. What a stroke of sympathy.
Married and hungry. Not a good combination competition. As I said give him enough rope and she will say the famous thing to regret. He will then use the rope to climb his own paranoia. Just because you are does not mean they are not out to get you. Sly isn't it?
Wash the whatever on a weekend morning to make sure time is not wasted. Walk the dry DIY and find a guillotine. Use it fashionably. Cut the money and have none. Bring elements together of a periodic dinner table and use the relative values to purchase a new one. Then ignore the relative who does not visit and you probably would not recognise anyway.
Be confounded and realise too late that art is the only way out. But there is no door to this picture.
And she turns to get undressed a window opens.

We sip the flood that drowns us, inevitably. Confounded Letter 8.

Stepping on stones that are no longer there. The choice creations we have actively creatively compared. I first drew a duck on the back of an brylcreemed primary school photograph with a thick pencil.
I remember sitting locked in the bathroom reading Robinson Crusoe all day. One of the few presents I got. All with thorns. I remember Walter De la Mare and quinqerimes from Nineveh in an old maids classroom. We have all the time in the world. To caress cross our bravery and meet our makers. Locked tight in huge families of cotton and cold coal.
And onward to study the remains of this year of days locked again repeating as parrots with no understanding. To education that no one could see the value of but me and the old man down the road. Getting a world of trouble because I could not cut a straight line. And later...
Loving too much to break down for ever with a syringe in the base of a spineless spine. Only one moment in forever. Please my helplessness hit me so I may focus. The Doctor, I don't want to feel this way forever. A lost month of wishes not wanting to cry any more. Don't, continued the Doctor, read that, read this. A choice between Joyce and the x-ray specs in the back of Superman.
And everybody has got to learn this in this way as the mellotron played. Strike the chords and wonder if you will get home from self imposed exile in your France.
The green woodpeckers of the gypsies and the black potatoes and mint they fed us. A single chord on a church organ shines frosted coloured through the window dedicated to St Michael. A Gauguin Christ lowered in yellow fields. Straw hat drunk in the marshes of the south. The crows of San Remy in homage painted later in loved colours. A woman singing in a bedroom above the street.
The same one in a Loire scullery stripped and asking if I liked it, in flawless English. Of course I did. Oh I did, it was forgetting that was the problem. Yes was way and Ampereheure bien, je vous connais maintenant, was all you said at the end.

Now this orchard and spirit kept me as quiet as dead thirty years ago. Confounded Letter 9.

Considering hermeticism and all its ramifications rapidly expanding above and below. Given the reading matter I was courting.
Returning from home thoughts from Browning foreign thoughts from weather it was coldly indifferent to any of my plights. Nothing could be done and nothing to stop him beating until I experienced this by measured consideration. So I returned to the street in the middle of nowhere and the wild wood, the light less valley and the dirty rotten railway mine. It was interesting that I cried for the loss of jobs when all the coal slag had done was kill. I made a film of it, now lost.
No one understood the aesthetic ether on celluloid and you had married someone else according to diaries. So I cut my hair and my fashion statements, such as they were and studied once more. I studied and considered and cuddled with Robert Graves, with his White Goddess. I found out that there was Beelzebub had a grandson and there was a Confederate General at Big Sur. That Fowles had the same Magus and The Glass Bead game was playing. I discovered that the Body Sang Electric, and Caligostro had ideas. It was then that I burned all the diaries on the highest hilltop I could find with a large degree of pagan pleasure.
Writing and painting were out and a certain succubus called Alexion visited most evenings. So I wrote about her before she died, like some others I loved. She sank into the bed behind me and I felt her spoon herself against me.
They took me in ringing tones small birds on the pits of sewage and showed me dead bodies in the same morgue. Two old men with a penchant for pornography, hot scalding tea and a lyrical longing turn of phrase.
The bodies were kept under wrapping in the back of the sewage farm, dust to dust, shit to shit, slit to slit and dead to doornail. The farm was at the end of a long double row of poplar trees and an orchard that was as incongruous as a.....and the bakery and laundry in the mine.
Alexion lisped when she cried, orgasm and I loved what she taught me.

This time and forever was an instant experienced, naked. Confounded Letter 10.

We stood under trees in the rain when the air it was green. And we looked for a sun dog at the end of the rainbow, contemplating this romantically for a while. This was your legend.
You have still to see what I can do with a class of wonders and that is remarkable but stubborn. When I find the learning listening styles from the children and come at them learning to learn. Look, draw what you see, not what you think you see and then speak the language you have learned in order to say what you have learned to learn
Although you did not see me ever doing this, you were absolved involved as each contributed contemplation ethics. If you allow unprotected discipline then they have won and thirty years of not allowing was enough to retire on.
The head of the Templar Knight and Bacon were one and the same, brazen and clanging harsh. Speaking in tongues. The code is in the first five books. The idea comes from the royal DNA. throughout the centuries diaspora. Thinking laterally about your tea-I-ching and complete the ceremony with a certain compliance complexity. A man rides in on Friday, three days later he rides out on Friday, how? Educate your thoughts in secret and let me read them. Don't interrupt when I am reading about them secret history hidden in esoteric thought police.
It is accepted that physicians cannot cure their own; in the same way teachers cannot teach themselves. I could not teach you yourself after thirty years of inner experience because you knew better from instant experienced now.
This teaching is part of my learning. Everyone can draw, if only with words. An artist learns to be artistic but not creative. We learn to use our eyes and in doing so we develop a sense of drawn perception. Nothing complex couples with this standing under the light filled tree and drawing with the smoke that comes out of my mouth. With the seedling that sticks to you when it drops.
Sticking to your spiral. Sticky Bob.
There is only one place to trace a spiral on a woman and the single flower spear stands upright in its vase. What the flower is depends on you. The nicest thing is when you pull you towards you and stand naked behind me.

If I've told you once, I've told you a million times, don't exaggerate. Confounded Letter 11.

So you tell me, so you say as if you knew what it is like. As a story begins it never ends. As a line without a beginning or an end. A circle you may think. The ideas are not the new without spiralled culture. Culture shocking is wrong with winging but why then say the one thing you know will hurt the artist? The person who does at least try, he said whining weakly.

When we threw our joints into the black hole light well, or when we made love in an electric storm. Do I really remember that?

Let things lie about themselves. Let me live in the warm stupor of my lack of criticism exorcism without telling me that I'm wrong. Let me lie in this conciousness bath of extremes with battles between art and technology a million miles away, but don't take it too far. Let me write a story without and within my story. It does not have to make sensitivity or serrated feelings in your conditions are all you ever want.

You dreamt of your dreams but you will all despicably destroy some one else's to make yours come true. Why do you do that? Putting all those adverbs in the way.

All men and women, who you say are a separate species, have the righteous, inalienable right to be a right person and you cannot be wrong because you are you. There is no need to create your visions until what you produce as artwork is the same as your dreams because your games will be given to you without price. Again because you are you. There then becomes no such thing as education because what is the point? They will give you everything you need. Your conception of paradise involves no movement. No creation and the word is Om or is found only in plural pent up Pentatuach. Or in a criticism of the holy word of old Nick Pauline .

I watch a roadside of grass with attendant dryad's detritus and I wonder from whose livery lives? I watch lighted windows from my train dusk drama and I wonder who has my painting tucked up cosy in their head.

Excerpt from a lighted lighting. Ah Alexion what did you do to me? I can smell my sea in briny becalmed sheets. I can hear my gull rocking on the wind and I can see my distances to the islands of Hy Brassil. That is why we like the west. Because there is heaven.

Little dreams, do you savour the taste. Are these inventions? Do you invent your dreams? Do you create mystical systems? Films from a dream factory, games, interactive.

Are your dreams compositions? Does mind submerged below talk to mind above in weird collision course empathy? Look at the beast, consider Hermetic thought. As above so below.

Is it redundant, as you will probably find, to dream when all around is strange, new redolent and vivid with sight and sound? Of course dreams are evocative. But are they now also the by-products of boredom?

We could suspect that vivid dreaming is one way of perhaps gaining some answers. Producing the unexpected from the consciously uncreative mundane. This would imply external force. Is this necessarily the case? Do the Gods have dreams? But then you cannot blame them.