But oh! what the Year delivers… And, oh! the sweet power of willed intent
¡Feliz año nuevo a todos mis amigos de Espíritus libres intrépidos!
My photo • Dawn over Lake Chapala • Mon 01 Jan 2024
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GOOD MORNING PUNJAB!!!
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Go stain the night with sultry colours torn
from dungeons, ruby melt and magma haze.
Go spatter purple promise on the dawn
and thrash a brace of bellows beasts to raise
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another blister-pimpled day! Go freak
out night, then fry up dawn with butter, jam
an orange bloody from Seville, a streak
of bacon, Shankar rashes, Shiva Shambo,
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dancing Kali cutting off some heads
Orpheus pining on his flute while Woden farts—
What awesome gods could fire such raging reds,
reck blue, then fuck like tigers for the Arts
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so dawn adores you, fiery rivers
awe you—but oh! what the day delivers…
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Mon 01 Jan 2023
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Greetings to you all fierce warriors of the light!
¡Saludos! a todos ustedes, feroces guerreros de la luz!
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This New Year's morning I went on my dawn walk to Parque Riberas del Pilar.
Standing on the balustrade by the water's edge I watched a low streak of orange breaking out across the eastern shores of Lake Chapala. The night was still dark but I could see clouds looming over the lake, heavy and thick, as if the thunderous dark wanted to squash all promise of the day. Perhaps even to squash the promise of a Brave New Year. But the orange glow had other ideas. I want to say it was the most intense orange I have ever seen: a deep, burning red-orange that looked as if it had just been ladled out of the fiery cauldrons of Vulcan's forge in the early days of creation.
The cosmos prevailed and what a dawn it was for 2024! A thick molten sun-juice poured out all over our beautiful earth. As if, in the cosmic café, Earth had just asked the waitress for jugo de naranja especial as a treat for the first day of the year.
As I walked home I began composing a special New Year greeting for you all.
I wanted to say I saw an amazing sunrise. Amazing? How boring is that. I have to do poetic justice to what I had just witnessed. In so doing I remembered some of the other blesséd risings I have been privileged to see over the years of my life's unfolding.
Camping off the cliffs of Cornwall with my first girlfriend: pulling back the tent-flap to see the rising orange glow, I can still feel the thrill of life, the upsurge of joy, the upwelling of promise and delight. Joy to be alive! Joy to breathe the vital air; joy to be thunderstruck by the audacity of existence, my own sweet existence, my lover's existence; earth's existence and the warm dawning sun as it pours down its first rays to warm the night-shivered cockles of a budding new day.
And now that same feeling, that same sense of promise busting out from underneath the louring clouds over Lake Chapala this very morning, on this first day of 2024.
I will stay with my conviction: This morning was the most intense orange glow I have ever seen. And yet all my other sunrise memories will rise up in revolution if I continue to make that claim. And so to keep the peace I have included the above sonnet which is testimony to another amazing (that word again) sunrise back from my hippy days in Hindustan.
Actually it was my first morning in India.
Some friends and I had just crossed the border from Pakistan at Ferozepur and, desiring to get to Manali as quick as possible, we opted for the midnight express to Kalka. The train was completely jammed and for several hours I was squashed on a bench with a dozen other dhoti-clad Punjabis, mostly local villagers. As the hours wore on I got bumsore and, taking my small bag, went to stand at the carriage door. This being a third class train, complete with passengers on the roof, I soon discovered that you could open the doors. So I did; I opened the door where I was standing. Leaning into the side, I sat down with my legs dangling over the train wheels.
Sensational! And totally unthinkable back in Europe! If at that moment I had to define Freedom, no question but to sit at the open door of a Third Class not-very-Express Indian railway train with the morning breeze ruffling your hair and the smell of diesel fumes and cow dung fires welling up in the old curiosity bazaar of the mind and conjuring up half-forgotten memories wreathing up from the scented well springs of past adventure.
Luxuriating in my new found freedom, I watched the villages go by in the dark, some with people already up, candles flickering or burning haybrands for light; children leading cows; women pulling water at the well, old grannies tending cowdung fires in front of their mud-walled houses. After a long clattering rumble over a cantilevered bridge across one of Punjab's many great rivers (the Sutlej?) the train turned a curve and there—oh my god—was the spectacle I described in the sonnet. Totally amazing. Er no, that word again; that won't do—
The abra-cadabramazing, ablazamazing, goose-bump, skin-prickling Naturaj dancing Shivamazing unforgettable first day's Hindustani sunrise in my glorious new found Shambala of peace, love and Hippy freedom.
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~~oo~~OO~~OO~~OO~~oo~~
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Let me tie in a few threads here. The last sentence of the Punjab sonnet goes:
But oh! what the day delivers…
This is significant. There is method in't.
The end of the poem bring us to my very first day in India; that moment a few hours later when I arrived at Kalka Railway Station and—oh, what the day delivers—the full riot of Hindustan in all its mad, crazy glory; heat, dust, confusion; hawkers, pakora wallahs and a hundred rickshaw drivers converging on the single hippy sticking out like a hooker in paradise. Hashish sahib? Hotel? Good sir, best and cheapest! Change money? Finding the bus station; no buses to Manali, only to Simla; three hours to wait, the chowk a hungry, sweat-soaked parade of a thousand different street wallahs, tandoori ovens and chai-khanas all mouth watering; all pulling at you to come in and eat amazing (er, I'll let that pass) food you've never tasted before... on and on, cows eating old shirts, bullock carts loaded with sacks of cumin, old fashioned horse carts holding up traffic, never-before-seen dreadlocked sadhus wandering through the crowds with nothing but a trisul and then a young Sikh kid racing through through the madness with no hands on the steering bar, oblivious to a thousand near misses while happily whistling a Hindi fillum tune to his heart's content.
And oh what the day delivers...
What promise was in that first day's dawn in India. I will never forget the insane exhilaration of finally arriving in the land of my dreams. I spent fifteen years in India and what an, er, amazing breakthrough, psyche-changing time it was.
But I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say I went through some terrifying moments, even a few on that first mad day in Kalka (like ordering my first meal, getting in a crazy mix up over the bill and feeling very white-man stupid as I argued over the tally).
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Which brings me to the sometimes-terror of any given oh-what-the-day-delivers.
Or: Oh, what the year delivers—even after this morning's great New Year sunrise.
One of my goals for 2024 is to be fearlessly truthful.
So I want to admit to the sometimes-terror, to the stomach-churn and to all the brutal knowing of my world. The knowing of my child; the world child; the terror of what people are doing to this earth, the terror of unstoppable madness; the terror of the ten thousand absurdities and the savage cruelty in Gaza as we speak. The terror of I-refuse-to-forget trenches in the First World War.
And then to the terror of the small and stupid; the terror of thinking: I can't write; I can't face my readers; shame, shame; shame on you (me) for putting out these absurd ideas, shame that you think you can change things, that you know any better.
Terror and shame is what I have to go through some mornings. It is the river I have to cross to be a writer; the gauntlet I have to run to be a warrior. That's why I mentioned 'depression' in the last stack. So Reason reasoned with Heart. Good. So it should. And harmony was achieved.
But I'll tell you something else.
I've got to the point where I revel in it! I revel in the fear, the terror and the shame. Yes! Because I own it. I sit there and I stare it out. And I wait for my glorious sun to melt my fears like so much dew on the night-soaked blades of grass in an English country garden.
And today I feel so full of joy.
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~~oo~~OO~~OO~~OO~~oo~~
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This is not what I meant to write on my first 2004 stack! I wanted to give a serious overview of where we are headed. This is the Kionist Manifesto after all. We have a Brevolution to take care of.
Instead I'm revelling in the one-in-a-milion Brave New Dawn's vermilion-streaked promise of great things to come.
And in this mood of joy I don't want to have to deal with boring details like sharks, narcs, Garcs and upper class thugs lording it over a brain dead humanity.
But oh! what the day delivers…
And deliver it does! This is a very powerful First Day. (As they all are.) It is a day of vision; a day of promise and a day of resolution. It is a day when those with stars in their eyes and with the divine goblet of supplication in their hands can reach out into the golden rise of the first year's sun and fill their cup with the wilful magic of this year's intent.
But oh! what the Year delivers…
We live in perilous times. We don't know what the year will bring. But I'll tell you this.
Right now, what the year delivers is in our hands!
This is a day that resonates with the intent of divine creation. During these special early-year days (until the sixth of January) there is great power in listening to the gods and matching our resolution with that of the universe. On this day of promise what we will to do for the year ahead will be reflected in powers of divine magic that will remain with us over the course of 2024, however troubling some parts of the year may turn out to be.
As for myself, I have so many plans, visions and future essays to put into these Fearless Arts Substacks that I have decided to put the ideas into a series of New Year word sketches over the next two weeks.
Of course the ruling classes are a nuisance and must be disposed of. This is a given.
But I also wanted to free myself up for how I go about presenting the journey to La Nuevalución and Brevolution. (Aka the British Revolution.)
This requires a bit of inner prepping.
Later in this New Year's Day of Days I shall let go of everything. I will go into a ground zero of collapse. I will have a nadir moment where I allow myself to stop writing the stacks altogether.
I think it is important for me (or anybody actually) to give themselves full permission—and hence freedom—to be the person they want to be for the year ahead. Sometimes freedom has to start from nothing: Total surrender. To be a speck of dandelion puff blowing in the breeze.
I shall undress. I shall hand my Guardian Angel all my hopes and dreams. And then I shall take a long hot sauna in the Cloud of Unknowing.
When I get out, who knows what will happen?
Will the Universe give me a towel? Hand me my clothes back? Will I get a new set of hopes and dreams? Will the Angels give me another cup of New Year Resolutions?
I don't know. But I shall find out. And then I shall let you know.
Meanwhile I'm glowing in the purple promise of God's outrageous New Year's dawn. Hasta mañana!
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May you all find your divine purpose for the year ahead.
Blessings
Steve
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Juan Grattan • Watercolour • Dawn over Lake Chapala • Mon 01 Jan 2024
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~~oo~~OO~~OO~~OO~~oo~~
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