Day 18 - Jan 18th

CARCASSONNE

“Hey bud, you got any ID on ya?’

He wants to buy booze.

He's shirtless on a scooter.

No.

It's delicious to say it as a complete sentence.

And mean it.

Without qualifier.

And then just go back to your life.

The circle of concern—

A pinhole now.

I always thought

When the camel

Jesus was banging on about

Went through the eye of the needle,

It would get one hump through

Then stop.

The needle drops

On the middle eight.

Late (but not too late).

No.

The frantic game

Does not need to be played the way

The board masters intended.

We change.

Exchange.

Her love is ballasts and wings enough.

I will pass go.

I am not in jail.

Red does not do it justice.

Auburn is not right.

When the sun catches it—

Catches it alight

Like starry kindling—

Her hair,

Red clay from the Colosseum

And Vesuvian loam,

Black as night.

She sits on a wooden chair,

Whitewashed stone wall

With accidental ombré.

I on the bed.

She is younger than I,

Though not by much.

Always there,

Though just not heeded.

Now a changeling,

Desperately needed.

And she loves me

With the same unspoken fervour it would seem,

With the patience of a nymph.

Those who see them flitting about the forest think they know,

But such creatures stand outside of time,

As the trees do.

Trees do not say,

"I am hundreds of years old."

They do not know.

They just grow.

She has waited forever to give instruction.

You will pass go.

Chaste as a knight.

But still, of course,

I want to empty myself into her.

For she is beautiful and in love with me,

And for me, and with me.

"Mine," I want to say.

The grabbing mind beats at the oak door

Outside the room.

And she would let me take her

And empty myself into her

And forgive me,

For she knows I would be far away then,

And empty.

I pull on spatchcock galoshes—

Little birds over my feet.

So sturdy and strange.

She approves,

Understands things I do not.

Love alone will not get you through the eye of the needle.

Faith must hold its hand.

Then great Bedouin caravans can pass through,

Laden with treasures.

And the greatest of these is love.

We are here now,

Far away from such sandy gates.

Carcassonne cloud-piercing.

Her highest tower.

And I understand one thing at the expense of all others

I am to bring her

Chalice after chalice after chalice,

And touch her face.

The laying of the hands

Can happen

In this completing space.

Niall Campbell

---

I advocate that clients 'ship' their work.

This statement is very amorphous and must be understood as such. 'Ship' is a term I borrowed from Seth Godin, I think. It has a sort of marketing sensibility, things flying out of a dispatch warehouse. There's a sort of workaday quality to it, which is important. Steven Pressfield's approach echoes this, and their relative time cutting their teeth and ploughing their furrows in marketing and copywriting speaks to that.

Get it on the pallet and get it the fuck out of here.

This clock-punching, merry factory floor feel is good. Think Christmas elves, happy in their work but all the same with billions of toys to get ready. Whistle, but meet your quota.

It's all good. It's stylish oversized glasses meets lunch-pail blue-collar mentality.

It's very useful to the artist in recovery. I'm living it. Shipping a polemic and a poem from my phone every day over very early morning coffee and croissant, ducking out whilst the three-week-old babe in arms sleeps with her nana. It's necessary. Finishing it off late at night when you want to go to sleep. There's value in that.

It sharpens your chops, or whatever other American phrases one might use.

I insult America as a member of her family—as a little brother insults the golden boy of the family. As kin. We Irish feel a right to do this. The concrete fabric of Manhattan is not built by Trump; it's built by labourers from all over the world. Many Irish. One of the seeds in the Big Apple—and the heart of the American nation—is a shade of green.

However, this Calvinist work ethic with a Southern Californian makeover is not of us. That came from elsewhere.

The modern Irish mentality knows what it is to straddle the border between chaos and order. Between ancient and new. We have one foot in the rapidly globalising theatre. The Celtic Tiger, while not the biggest of cats, was real enough. But we also have another foot in pre-time. It's not at the surface, but in regards to art, it is still there.

We have shipped a lot of work. We are an island nation; all work must leave the shores by sea. We know how to do this.

However, the notion of the muse and one's relationship with her does not work on a clock. Yes, you have to get out of bed at 4:30 and be at your desk at 5:00 am and punch your clock, as Steven Pressfield would have you do. Yes, you have to kill your darlings when required and trim the word count by half. Yes, do your three to four pages of morning pages and get volume out there. But you cannot coax your muse from her litter so easily. Those who have a sensibility for the old world know this.

She will sometimes walk, bleary-eyed, into your world, whisper the inspiration into your ear. But she will never, ever ask you what time it is. No more than a tree would ask you what time it is. And as a result, she will never ask you to ship things. Before I button myself into my life, I listen to what my dreams want me to ship.

This poem tells of a mad-as-a-box-of-frogs dream I had.

I was in a room, and my muse walks in. We were in love; she looked like a girl I saw once in a dirt-poor part of Portugal on a jeep safari. It was strange to go to such a place, full of cork trees and arid little mountains, half an hour from the developed Algarve coastline but a thousand years and miles away. This stunning farm girl with bright red hair came out and around the corner. With hazel eyes and no English. This was not a physical attraction. I was a hot-blooded young male. One of the last holidays I went on with my family before I struck out on my own around the world.

I think every boy, in their privacy or their own heart, carries an imprint of this first encounter with something beyond mere horniness.

Your heart getting pulled out of your chest by a yearning for something you can’t understand. This is your first flesh-and-bone encounter with the muse.

This notion in my dream and poem is clearly informed by Robert Johnson, the psychodynamic therapist and author who anthropomorphises the muse as a maiden who the knights of the round table must be chaste with.

Far from gobbledegook, clients of mine who have moved into sobriety or got off THC laden weed will often report a period of ‘REM rebound’, where their dreams will be fecund with meaning after periods of faulty, dreamless sleep (or at least no recollection of dreams).

The muse—the anima for men—will often show up as a beautiful female that they yearn for but know, on some level, that the relationship transcends carnal desires. She is more beautiful and bespoke to them than the pornstars the algorithms have sussed out for them and know will be incredibly seductive to them. But as Robert Johnson says, if in this dream space you can avoid giving in to your carnal desires, you will be blessed with something far deeper—a connection to your art which is far more satisfying than sex.

If you think this is weird nonsense, watch Prince make love to his big purple guitar. It's not a woman; he doesn't try to put his dick in it. But he absolutely, one hundred percent, makes love to his guitar.

This is not guttural. You can taste when food has been made with love, when a hearth has been set with love at your bougie Airbnb, when the poem has been written with love, when your child did the crazy finger painting for Mother’s Day with love. This goes so much deeper than mere discussions of men and women. Even masculine and feminine. It taps a very primordial well of the human psyche, and it is foolish to baulk at such things.

The muse is your channel to nothing short of love itself—a type of self-compassion and ultimately self-regard that we will all benefit from down the track in ways that you can scarcely understand.

I believe that an enormous—an absolutely enormous—reservoir of energy is being lost into porn. (Billy Connolly used to call the internet "the world wide wank,") Great works of art are quite literally getting spunked away because people, like moths, seek the absolute darkness on the other side of the flame.

You have to learn how to say no.

To be chaste to the carnal distractions of the world—not as some puritanical exercise, but rather because the opportunity cost is so massive. You owe yourself a deep and satiating détente with nothing shy of your inner muse. She will never, ever let you down. She loves you outside of time.

You can have an affair. Just not with the internet. Not with a flesh-and-blood projection of the muse onto another person, who will not—and should not—be able to carry your lightning. They will eventually topple down from the pedestal you have imprisoned them on, and it will collapse upon your head.

You can consummate this affair through art. It will help your marriage. Ask any couple for whom a creatively blocked partner has truly come out the other side. The other partner feels a type of needy energy—once directed at them—that is no longer their department or responsibility. They can go back to doing more mortal things for the one they love: being a partner, lover, confidant. But not something the other is trying to consume and cage, while paradoxically promoting to demigod status at the same time.

So many men's relationships falter because they are emotionally unavailable. They have never been shown how to climb the great tower, lay down their talents at the feet of the muse, feel her stroke their hair, and lay her hands upon their face. They have never sobbed until they were spent, been told of their intimate and ultimate masculinity and goodness, or felt complete—worthy and of great use to their community.

Man cannot live on bread alone.

Learn to say no to the noise and yes to your muse.

She is waiting.