A notion strikes me. Humanity can come - and it can disappear. Guge is a likely future for New York, or my home in Alberta, Canada. Were I to reappear in a few hundred years, what would I see? Jack squatting for a shit under the hull of an old hospital? Frolicking orgiasts, kept eternally youthful with help from newly implanted radiation-gobbling regeneration glands..? Nobody knows - not even God... Will it ever be possible to transfer between fates as easily as we wish to?

What exactly happened to Guge? Nobody knows for sure, but historians have been pointing fingers for a long time at Islamic marauders. Look it up in the guidebook - I'm tired of being a copycat. It's more interesting to see how the Guge kingdom may be an emblem for the whole human destiny. But what am I saying? Don't most of us assume the human race ought to live forever? I've spotted one of our greatest weaknesses: the illusion of species assumes the human span is endless, infinite - equal to god. Yet, nobody will be so foolish as to suggest we've come anywhere close to building a New Jerusalem... A shopping plaza maybe. But out here, with nobody around, old Guge suggests that we shall never achieve a divinely immortal destiny on Earth. Not that I don't want to see the best world for all... But we judge each other too much. We're too vainly dependent on material realities, and illusions too. We depend far too much upon the indefensible isolation from one another... You feel superior when you aren't really superior. There's no need for it. I still believe, and it's my particular prejudice, that there is a wonderful thing called great poetry, but it's rare; and most poetry today, as yesterday, is actually very poor. Today, it's all gone to prosaic, anti-lyrical, unmusical and sententious descriptions of trite, topically dull householder obsessions: meanwhile the grand themes of cosmic experience have been evicted or trivialized into tepid slogans and the sort of dull cliches which obsess jingly pop lyricists. At the same time, the creative heart has been squelched by bureaucracies of approval, which reduce the artist to a middle class worker... If you go off by yourself to be an author - instead of working or processing yourself through the middle class approval system - you will be called a bum, and that's all. But if you want to "have a career" then you must join up with the university, the grant camp crew - or sell-out to the corporation. What a laugh: you are nobody unless you turn into a civil servant or squeeze out some crappy-hack pop music from the mighty corporate anus. Popular mediocrity makes money, that's it. I don't care if the whole world goes to hell with pollution. In this mood of despair, my time completely wasted - I become just another death god - jesus wearing the mask of thanatos - and you know what? I don't give a shit at all! Oh well, I suppose they will always keep a few senior writers around - repeatedly allowed in and granted an audience... Born in New England? Then you too can be a famous - even an important American writer! Yet, how we have cultivated distraction and fashion - and what money can buy - instead of serious reflection and concentration! We have lost the music of words, and, having sold out to inferior forms of commercial art, we grow up into a world that inhibits inspired creativity: I think it's our compulsively collective need for instantaneous electronic gratification; further, the social morass of "acceptable forms" obliges that we forfeit any and all chance for letting experience give us the profound language we most need...

So, poetry, for the time being, has left us. Maybe it will find some opportunity to return in the future - I don't know... As for now, we're afraid to say anything that doesn't crumble as easily as soda biscuits... Literary art is so simplistic today: nobody dares a complex vocabulary. Art literature is forbidden - unless you do nothing more than study someone "great" who's already dead. Now, it seems only scientists and university dons still have the right to use a big vocabulary. But what a laugh - because everybody else who wants money for their "creative" work is forced to market hormonally reactive dross to semi-literates. Write as you please - as art and life compels you to write - sure you can, but that's asking to be ignored... If you don't write for the market, you will be belittled by the practical "winners." Because - if you don't write according to the pre-established two-dimensional genres that use plenty of grey freight action description, you won't sell! If your poetry really is profound instead of dully prosaic, you will be called insane - or too obscure - a stylist of form with an impenetrable content: whatever the pigeonhole, it will be a small one... Those few who can still call themselves artists have no choice but to beg crumbs from intolerant funding systems. At the other end, the downright fakes: the dreamy fantasy and sci-fi hacks, the hand-bags and diamond-studded caddies of pop, the romancers of pulpy schlock and the gas jockeys of blood and guts - all those cleverly square calculators are so awfully proud and superior - but only because so very many dumb people love them. They ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO write and sing according to prescribed genres that comply with simplistic and dull creative conventions! Okay, maybe there are still a few fine jazz singers, one or two poets among all the crappy sappy song-writers - ah, but so few, so few! Poetry really WAS. Money IS. We forgot what it's all for... But I'll do it anyway, despite all the shitty rich and superior fakes and their crass, shallow, fearful, semi-literate ignorance of what art is, and what it may yet be... a gloriously deep thing, intense, aware and alive with profound insights. We may yet rediscover the true essence of love...

Nothing's going to make us wiser again, until we relax and forget fear - the great bane of ultramodern time - the fear that holds so many under the gun-wielding thralldom of too few ideas... For fear makes us hate ourselves and kill our fellows, just as greed makes you write any old thing. It's like trying to point out obvious things that nobody dares acknowledge... For example: Arabs and Jews are exactly like spoiled brothers and sisters, twelve years old, who can't stop bickering! We need to realize so many things personally: we can't go on saying and believing that we have to fight simply because we think that's the nature of people. Rebecca West and her ilk always said that just so they could get in with the right crowd; but, I don't want to get in with the right crowd: I could care less. Perhaps devils fight because they feel it's their nature, too. ...The old sun doesn't burn for your life: it's alone and dead. The sun and the moon don't care whether you live or die. But you really can write poetry because you see that you are alive and the sun isn't, and because you realize that the difference between the sun and a cup of water has given you your mortal life. At some point, if the human destiny is to be transformed into eternal life, then we must rise up to peace: freedom already belongs to us; yet peace and harmony, the tranquility of civilization achieved - that wish abides above the lies we need to tell; and that's the truth we cannot quite reach... The good thing about humanity: we want freedom to speak, to live, and to give more than we are forced to take. Perhaps we may come to love each other more than we need to hate...!

I can fail! I might suffer a lapse and fall into anger and do something bad. But that isn't why I get scared of myself sometimes... I'm just too impotent and anti-social. Left myself out... Oh I know, the way things are anger us everyday... I found the weird shit written below on some nutball website, by some little loss of a whiner - a fascist. So many nutcases right now, aren't there? At least, he's probably kept under some safe kind of supervised psychometric control: a ballplayer, a software genius, a recipient of unemployment insurance, or even a big cash sweepstakes... All so he can say: "Gimme a new contract, pleeease, pleeease - daddy!" He does seem buttered-up with judgements and certainties. Maybe he's duping over injustice and unnecessary social divisions? Choose your favorite wrong judgement: he's a slime-moldy racist warmonger, a dirty peacenik unemployed bum lout, or else just one more of the very many misrepresented drop-outs who populate the earth with their perennial disenchantment...

"...Muscleheads of the world have been shaking hands for the past forty-five hundred years... Currently, America is the main model for Musclehead-ville and Americans do need to kill each other, over and over and over again... With svelte body-image, each free and democratic dork totes his gun under an insecure burger bun. That's crass desserts for having become tv-photon junkies. Meanwhile the Germans tend to their chic and sickly self-loathing - German babes - beggars all, they'll really do anything and brag about it afterwards; the senseless French pride - stinks like old vinegar - and ignores all but their own spawn; the rot of old-bag Russia and her barbaric stupid push-and-shove that passes for being a man... It's all so pitiful, these husks and remnants of national character that people wear as if they equaled a great identity!... Any old shit passes for classy manners now. The insular cold hearts of Canada - their stuffed-up righteous ignorance for all but Kanuckiana - a mask for hickville; let's not even bother with the snobby cruelty of liberated Scandinavia; forget the dumb repeat offenders who still rule South America; the killer apes of Africa - they don't exist - they've killed each other already; the crappy lost British and their glorious past, ruined by the last war they were - and they won't admit it; Arabs - throwing chunks of dirty meat at each other on the floor, beating their wives and then doing a lot of import whores; Jews - blind and wilful - xenophobic to the point of murderously stupid idiocy, and also jamming import whores; and let's not forget the innumerable crowds of mechanical old-boy Chinamen, wanking in unison!

"The brutal ways are victorious, and the gloss is sold hard and fast by military corporations quite happy to bubble-pack an insatiable lust for nice things and you're crazy and weak if you refuse to consume more, more and more money... All right! The industrial march-step, the mighty might of marketing, the selling of useless trash in place of living: the selfish pride of the rich, who are blameless, blameless - for winning the slick life of the city-borne - so we all can certainly believe themselves rightfully privileged!

"The diseases of our time are bought and sold in the name of love, but it's just another deceptive adjunct, one more component in the chemical soup with which we compel ourselves to sleep passively with the wish to kill ourselves, a Marilyn Monroe soft-smile playing over our lips... Dare we ask, why are we all so happy to die!? The problem remains one of hunger. How can we earn enough to buy dinner for everybody?

"But the poor and the rich now, they share the same pop-talk. You don't have to think too much to be a toughnut on the make. That's why I die and you don't know why. Look at the glorious muscleheads of America - publicly broadcasting the opinions of people who are already rich - that's all we pick-up on our cable link. As for the poor hunks who live on the crumbs of nothing - them that's on the street man - they's told what to do and say too, and they's fair good at sayin' the same thing, jus' in anotha lingo... 'merica, land of the free, land of the poor - same thing, man. It's a fairly middle class scene in there, man. You wanna think bout somethin' smart? Think 'bout how to get a grant, man! Gnaw, gnaw... and if you don't wanna chew on that thick wire man, you jus' get outa here boy, we don' wanna hear ya outside pissing on de street - no how!

"Today I'm angry, but today I am free. So - I'm free - and maybe I should stop being angry, right? I should be like you and mom, happy to be free - and who gives a shit about anybody else: bubble-gum happy inside my dream of being a shit-hot know-it-all-big-man... It's all lots of noise!

"I don't care if I die tomorrow, but I am afraid of dying. It's true. You don't believe me!? I'm a freestanding installation, generously funded - a public jack in a private socket - stuck-up high above my own solitude. Anger fades, is gone. Why? I'm just about spoiled enough now that I can almost sell that anger - just like you! I won a nice 200-dollar book-buying allowance. I can coat the walls of my ivory glower with your snot, too...! He's singing again. They'll just say, "Shut up, why don't ya!? Sell it for nothing! So you can hate yourself for loving me!" You can feel me for free - in about two or three hundred years - maybe! I'm getting by bald memory easy now... The sun welcomes me. I buy silence by the dozen... Forget all the above: it really really is supposed to be nonsense... Why do I feel good again? Is it merely some chemical hand pushing and stroking my lobes...? Can you reach that high better with or without drugs? You tell me what you want. Since I'm an obedient little civil servant, I'll give you what you want!"

...It's the remembrance of having enough fins to deal with the scene you made, and then getting nowhere... That must be it! I'm happy for the first time in days. I feel like I've accomplished something: riding all the way to Guge. I have. The sun does smile and my blindness doesn't pain me anymore. I'm waking up to sleep, and it amuses me. I have no ways and means - and never will. Good, I'm free.

The mountain is under me now. I can see all around... I'm going to make you forget. I'm going to change the mood: I'm leaving the country and never coming back. Okay, I'm no longer angry - I'm sad. But I'll be just like you, friend: I can smile and lie, again. Here goes..!

To be sensible is to get passed the distracting destructiveness of emotive reaction. The human creature is destined for frustration, but that isn't a tragedy, is it? Since we already see everything that we are, we can breach our limitations and create progress. But the key to the human puzzle is essentially one of the heart and free will. We are not meant to fulfill a special design; all the idealism about history is unnecessary. Realize this, and you can relax and live creatively.

We have to think our way into the future. As I have suggested, intelligent life is spontaneous and we are more creative than a being who merely reflects an innate pattern, like some fantastical sort of vegetative nature belonging to that strange, impossible world that Hegel and Kant would have compelled us to fulfill. Instead, artists usually believe in the individual creative identity that most clearly distinguishes their personal humanity: so, imagination reflects the small bit of divinity left in our nature. After all, we artists always have wished to realize more than we can achieve; always, we feel that our work was not high enough, nor so fine as we intended. The core of communal and individual aspirations all began together upon a longing for eternal significance. But that sensibility appears to have left many of us indifferent. It seems obvious that intellectual and aesthetic sensitivity evolved from a much older spiritual legacy. So, the inspiration of joy appear to have changed from communal to more individual springs: priest was replaced by artist. Yet something of old Adam always remains in us, and not in the simple way we want to believe in scriptural myths as literal truths, but in that deeper sense as we realize identity is defined by a long history of beliefs and ideas possessing us with an insatiable fascination for mythic reflections about "who we are." Because today, we still have a strong sense that the creative imagination is part of an expressive harmony, a stream of identity made conscious. That intuition makes a wish for each of us... We want to be more than we are, we want to reach the happier destiny. It's no surprise that each culture, and each spiritual denomination, has a higher end in mind: mortality, the force of gravity, space and time alone may be responsible for the peculiar human yearning for God and enlightenment. So it appears to us today... I don't think anyone really knows why we need to believe. But it is obvious that the brightest do want to know more than can be understood! Are you awake enough to be curious in the first place?

The universe is within our imagination. So, we are part of everything that makes us alive. Everything that seems real to us finds an easy unity only within our understanding: perceptions inform all inspirations... Yet, outside and beyond the unifying power of our thoughts, the universe remains quite independent, and meaningless, except perhaps the special part that we imagine "everything that is" plays in the dream god's uncle or sister happens to have for all of us. Truth and reality depend on the mood, the weather and sufficient nutrition... The objective scope of appearances are always underlined, defined, limited or expanded by our subjective psychic state, etc...

Humanity is not only an accident of nature, it's a sublime mystery. So, we write poetry and make paintings because we are compelled to express what we wish to know, as for what we feel. Everything we are is made of being alive; and we come but briefly to discern this reality.

...I hear the singing without really noticing at first. Several voices sing from the river. All the voices belong to men. A chorus... What do they say? I cannot see them - they're three or four kilometres away, over there by the river, south of Tsaparang village. What sort of Tibetans would sing like that? Monks? But the voices sound like ordinary men, or travellers who decided to make music. For their song is like a call, a lament, and not an incantation. It's like a verse full of sorrow, trying to invoke love and hope. The chorus yearns for peace, and I feel the singers want to leave their suffering behind, but cannot. It's the middle of morning and their voices rise louder, like a wish to carry far beyond their huge and perfect valley... I look to the river, listen and rest.

The singing goes on. They sing for ten minutes, twenty, then an hour as I explore the king's palace on top of Guge. The men's voices fly upon shy winds. They pause for a rest. When they start again, I stop still, listening closely; the voices are like God watching me from afar. Their emotions are so plaintive and unappeased: it's the kind of music you don't want to hear, because as you listen, the heart moves with a strange anguish. The voices are full of weary suffering, an anquish that I cannot understand, since it's beyond my experience. I get the same feeling from Greek tragedy. Their beseeching tone is like a question: they call to their Lord for an answer. But their voices wonder: how can we receive an answer? I sense they want to sing from sorrow all the way back to joy; passing through despair they can reach and believe in some earlier, forgotten state of well-being, as if it should become their truth once more. I distinctly hear a desire for joy beneath their words: it sounds like a smile seeing past pain... How long have these poor men sung to the deaf-mute valley of the Sutlej?

A stairway tunnel leads into the earth beneath the ruined palace of the king. Here is the private chamber of the king and his family. This cold place is a tiny hovel of four or five rooms. Only lamps and tapestries could make it warm inside. Apparently, the king and his wives retreated here in winter to keep warm behind the wind-proof walls of the mountainside. The rape of Guge was said to last several months: quite a difficult penetration. I snap a photo in back of the huge old skull. I'm looking out from the eye socket of the winter palace. I am not much bigger than its pituitary gland...

I read a description of the palace. Reading makes me escape the pain of the men's voices, still singing. Only one original temple is still intact on the "roof" of Guge. But it's all locked up and I can't get inside. Then, I discover a small funerary chapel in a cave below; the door is ajar. Inside the pitch-black space, I light the candle. The room is tiny, but big enough to hold a single coffin and a few mourners. The walls are replete with meditational deities in daemonic form, copulating after the familiar cross-legged manner of Samantabdhara and Samantabdhri; aspects of the deities depicted in this funerary chapel represent a fusion of Tibetan and Indian forms. Oh yes, one image is a local vision of Cakrasamvara, that curiously borrowed deity with roots in Hinduism. In the lingo of Tibetan iconography, the deity copulating in front of my eyes is Korlo Demchok, a wrathful, four-faced, twelve-armed meditational deity: he's doing it to his lover, Vajravarahi, even as he tramples evil Bhairava and Kali underfoot. Perhaps this repository for the royal dead is meant to remembrance the pleasures and conquests of life, even after that life has left us behind. I'm not an expert... Though grimy, the three hundred year-old paintings are well-preserved. Surrounding the larger images of Cakrasamvara-Demchok are several obscure, smaller ones, including a creature with a wolfish head and some other images designed to frighten away bad spirits. Tibetan emblems frequently appear among the deities at Guge, especially those representing door guards and the evocative details illuminating larger images, like necklaces of smiley skulls, dancing demons and gleeful skeletons. I capture them with my candle...

It's nicely chill inside this mountain-top mortuary and I'm in no hurry to go back outside to the burning bright day. I explore the ruins of a temple beside the king's audience chamber. I visit the south palace and discover a modest public square once used for royal festivities...

Everything is so eroded and ruined here. The vista on the spur of this little peak is fabulously 360. I want to stay, I don't want to go. I want to be the king and cannot... So I climb back down, feeling high and melancholy at the same time. I hear them again. The singers are still singing for their freedom. I'm not here, yes I am. I snack on sweet army issue biscuits. Then it's down the winding path at noon. At the bottom of the hill, all 170 metres of mountain stretches above me. I get an eyeful... Standing in the door of the Red Temple, accompanied by a male Tibetan guide, are two youthful Westerners, a man and a woman, professionals on an expensive holiday. Each wears a khaki safari suit. I say, "Hi," and ask, "How did you get here, drive up?" Maybe there's a god who knows why I don't linger to chat with them...