The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls

Kate Camp

• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780864736215
• eBook ISBN: 9780864737540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Taking a dark turn, this important New Zealand poet explores the legacy of a heretic who was burned at the stake in 1310 for writing a thesis called  Simple Annihilated Souls. Answering back, modern souls offer their own lamentations in poems such as "The Tired Atheist" and "Driving on the Bypass."

The mirror of simple annihilated souls

Of the life which is called the annihilated life

The annihilated barely make an imprint in this world

their beds are given away to others

they sleep suspended from the floor

by their own disbelief.

How this Soul takes no account of anything that might be

With great effort it resists the urge to count

the birds and flies that make fleeting

black lines across the world.

It neither springs forward nor falls back.

How such creatures no longer know how to speak of God

There was a time when he filled their mouths

with a mushroomy taste of semen

but that is not the same as understanding.

How this Soul is compared to an eagle, and how she takes leave of Nature

Like the great bird she is threatened by banalities

the growth of the suburbs and the ever increasing need for corn.

Ah! She takes leave of Nature by the most direct means possible

the world rising up to meet her, punctual death.

How this Soul is balanced between two equal weights, and how she is drunk from what she never drinks

What else is there to say? This world is heavy, she is its balance.

How this Soul swims in a sea of joy

Generations of waves approach laughing from behind

the world’s tear enters and leaks from her.

How the Soul has arrived at understanding of her nothingness

Or she says she has.

By what means the Soul has conquered, and how she is without herself

She has conquered by these means: anger, teeth and looking.

She is without herself

as at the moment the door slams

with its key inside

with its lock upon the soft nerves of the fingertip.

How it is necessary to die three deaths before one arrives at the free, annihilated life

The first death is the sweetest, in its novelty round in the mouth.

The next is unremarkable, an act of forgetting.

The third death does not bear thinking about

the body is a cave

and the mind that primitive creature caveman.

No wonder we live in houses, wear clothes and run to the telephone.

How the Soul sings and chants

At all times music is entering and emerging from her.

She is a marvel of repetition, echoing joy

as the canyons of the desert echo.

How this Soul is free, more free and very free

Free by means of her own hand.

More free by the world, its affairs and schedules.

Very free by loneliness, that key

she jingles in her pocket like money.

How the land of the sad is far from the land of the annihilated

Do you want me to draw you a map?

It would be all borders

no countries.

How the Soul is delighted by the suffering of her neighbours

They live in the dark. They speak not in words but in sounds.

How the Soul who has caused this book to be written excuses herself for making this book so long in words, which seems so small and brief to the Souls who remain in nothingness and who are fallen from love into such being

Apologies and excuses of course she doesn’t mean them.

They pour from her like golden wheat.

Mute song

i

The first time I saw you

I don’t know which I loved more

you with your tranquil neck

calmly transporting yourself through the world

or the one who followed you everywhere

trolling the dark waters like a hook.

ii

The strange thing was that

as each other’s opposite and negative

we were even visible

I with my tatty winter coat

smelling of reeds

you consisting entirely of surfaces

or should I say one fabulously curved surface

smooth and white as an egg.

iii

I have no idea what you saw when you looked at me

a shadow dully pursued by the shape that cast it

a placeholder reserving a space from nonexistence.

Perhaps ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• The mirror of simple annihilated souls
• Mute song
• Deep navigation
• The tired atheist
• The house of miniature art
• The totally artificial heart
• The Music Bureau
• Spider stories
• Japanese Death Poems Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death
• The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes
• When things get broken we recount their history
• The little miners
• Gambling lambs
• Driving the bypass
• The Colour of Pomegranates
• 101 more things removed from the human body
• Receive pure love and guidance from the magical unicorns!
• Thank you very much
• Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand
• Obelix
• Dusk falls on the cinema
• At the risk of defying God and courting annihilation
• Meatspace
• At the coming of Autumn
• At the coming of Winter
• At the coming of Spring
• At the coming of Summer
• Don’t get me started
• Notes on the poems
• Acknowledgements