In Praise of Imperfection ~ 1

My ideal is a state of permanent imperfection; only in the atmosphere of the imperfect can my lungs breathe. It is natural, my imperfection, and like life it is chaotic, shocking, warm, enjoyable and with all its might inquisitively striving against its imperfection.

In Praise of Imperfection

Measured on my hierarchical-ladder of striving, the striving for the “perfect,” for the “clear cut,” for the “once-and-for-all lucid, comprehensible and stable,” mustn’t even touch my ladder’s lowest steps. These must rather be identified with a will striving not see, trembling in fear at the prospect of seeing, and thus escaping the natural state of imperfection, the state of continual change and fluctuation, the impossibility to hit bottom and rest in the fields of knowledge, by concealing itself behind a mask of hostility directed at life, of sarcasm directed at those whose thinking leaves room for vagueness and warmth, and by tying itself to a rigid belief in her system of absolutes. One is certain of what one sees and therefore, one is blind.

Empyrium – The shepherd and the maiden ghost

“The shepherd and the maiden ghost”

‘t was an eve in late summer, autumn was nigh
still a warm sun did colour the sky
The meadows did shine in a strange golden light
and vales did forth the soft haze of night

When through the air a voice did resound
beckoning the shepherd to rise from the ground

The shepherd:
‘What sweet voice does sing in such a woebegone tone?
What maiden does wander the heather alone?’

Bewitched by its tone, he followed her song,
whilst the sun did descend and the shadows grew long
In the dim light of dusk, near the sparkling cascade
on a moss covered stone sat a crying young maid

The shepherd:
‘Why art thou dreary? What happened to thee?
What song didst thou sing so woefully?’

The maiden:
‘Go whither O shepherd! Don’t sadden thine heart
Thou canst not help me – not thou who thou art!
An old man who’s been born in a cradle of wood
of a tree that at least a hundred years stood,
cut by a boy who at heart was still pure -
might be my redeemer if he knew that he could…

Aesthetics, Perception and Other Stuff

And there were many who asked me: what is beautiful? And I answered: beautiful is that which is experienced without questioning, without thinking, without standing in the way of orgiastic feeling; hence, a certain level of intoxication and levity is necessary in every beautiful experience. Thinking always enters the scene when all is finished with, when the act of transcendence has receded back into the depth out of which it climbed, and thinking searches through the rubble of the shattered walls for his former cell, he is again aware of his surroundings as he settles back and refashions his self, as he again makes sense of thinking. Of course, without a certain amount of awareness there can be no aesthetic experience, but in the experience itself, awareness is forgotten, engulfed completely by feeling. The higher awareness climbs, the more sublime the artistic doors on which one knocks, but as one opens and enters, awareness is left behind, at the outer steps of pain and delight. Awareness understands his limits as from his distance he gazes the unfathomable depths into which thinking is not allowed.

Life and Existence ~ 1

For awareness to fall under the illusion that existence is grounded by its perception proper, awareness must function as to forget that its perception is a culmination of the evolutionary and adaptive course of life and that it is a priori grounded by existence in its bosom. It is a circular motion which point of origination is not the human though for his waking eye, gazing from somewhere along the circle’s line, it only appears that it is. There is no more preposterous than “world according to man” and yet, it is only of this world, or of its preposterousness, that man can speak; illusory, metaphoric, abstract, and yet the one and only.

Man’s body entire is sunk in the river of the unconscious with his eyes merely scratching, from beneath, the water’s surface. The value of man, his strength, is therefore to be found in his wide shoulders and his strong will which propel and maintain his body for the longest period possible up above the surface. In this disposition he will now behold, with the least amount of veils, “man according to the world.” The longer he stares the Medusa straight in her face, the harder will his heart become, and his art more sublime.

Science—though, perhaps, not without many a dogmatic assumption in methodological approach and lack of sight as for what, what then, to what end?—enabled man to verify, once-and-for-all, that man is according to the world, that the world works on its own following its own laws which do not rotate around the human, that the world which have begotten man will go on without him all the same. God, the metamorphoses of the world as man could no longer be tenable. God, the image of the world of man, shattered upon rocks and its pieces were carried by the waves out into the wide ocean never to be heard of again.

God, the outer-axis around which man’s hopes, aspirations, and social structure circled broke out of function. Man’s highest values deposited outside of man, in God, in the after-realm; values that, even in wanting to abrogate the will and making the world ugly, even in the numbing and suppressing of desire, the ultimate sin, served the purpose of making existence bearable and affirming life at the tremendous cost of living it negatively, now broke and shattered under the unrelenting blows of science’s hammer—a hammer which aimed, as far as values were concerned, for no other purpose except the shattering itself. As never before, man stood at the gates of his world alone, cold, deserted, and valueless.

Modern negative nihilism: the incredible fragmentation of individuals into replicas of the social paradigm; individuals which, following the death of God, stood with no value whatsoever and with an erased face in awe staring existence’s face; individuals thrown into one big tasteless pot boiling with nothingness as per flavor and main ingredient; individuals whose moral conscience is crushed under the unbearable weight of thousands’ years old shining-values which, in a day’s night, vanished with the fog leaving but one tremendous cry shattering the unseen walls of night: “all is permitted,” conscience is but a lie!

Existence does not require redemption, existence is only to be lived without a how or a why; but redemption is perhaps required from a previous mode of living. New values are to be constructed by the individual, in and for the individual; values which do not separate the individual from himself, that do not hinder but rather are the outcome of his becoming; values that in every step are taken apart and put together anew; values that, once-and-for-all, burry universality.

It is certainly the prejudice of a masculine mentality that paints life, whether in the happy or in the sad, using the face and body of a “woman.” The woman is there, simply waiting to be painted, to be given meaning, to be made.

Death, the Ruler ~ 2

Both seeping from the same bitter cup of death, Achilles sacrificed the moment, drank and in death got drunk for eternity’s sake, heightened to the most the moment of the glorious fall for the securing, in the eyes and memories of men, of immortality, whereas Hector strived to cling to the moment that alone laid in his grasp, to its warmth, touch and vitality; for him naught but fleeting shades in the desert are immortality and the glory of men, naught but desperate acts, hopes, to elude inevitability. Over their bones, with dusty feet now treads eternity; in death equals.

الرقص مع النجوم

مع امتداد اليد نحو قبة السماء
،تسكن الأرض الملتحفة برداء المساء
اليد، مثل الثمر البري تقطف النجوم من أشجار الأثير
،أشجار جذورها ضاربة في رحم الفضاء
والنجوم، من اليد تفيض لتغرق الجسد برعشة القبلات
.كالخمرة الدافئة تغمر قلب الحبيب رقصا وغناء

بين الفجر والمغيب

طال بي نهار فيه شمس تضيء

وجوها باردة، أضحت دون بريق

شفاه تتحرّك، أصواتا فارغة كالريح

أياد بيضاء ناصعة، ملمسها

بارد كرخام المعابد اللامعة

أحكام وأوهام وقشور فارغة

عيون تنزلق على المصطنع

لتغيب والشمس ساطعة

On Pity

When pity hinders the necessity of change, when it becomes a barrier keeping one from facing one’s greatest fears, when in holding one’s hand it takes away his opportunity of walking, making his own path—when pity does all this, pity kills love, it buries itself in the sands of self-hate and finds comfort and fortitude in feeling others’ bad fate. In pity love turns against love. Love, as friendship, is more sublime than pity. Through pity, the pitied finds reason not to flee his self.

Death, the Ruler ~ 1

Sore throats and outstretched necks but
hélas, to waste goes their lamenting chants.

No hands to push open the great-wooden-door,
and no ears to hear the rain-like
fall of their never-tiring chants,
for they residing the realm of death,
breathing eternity for a final end,
know nothing of what clamors up,
up in the living realm.

Their bodies feel naught but the moisture,
like a snake seeping through the sand.

Death, the Ruler

Amongst nightly shrouds
death lurks in wholesome pride,
breathing, waiting, to leap, to bounce
into warm flesh, to rejoice and
of his joy make a jubilating cry.

Being beautiful is not her destiny, but it is her cage from times immemorial.

Life and Existence

Existence does and does not reside outside our awareness of existence (contrasted with the fetus that is one with and unaware of his mother). For us, existence is and is not in our awareness of existence; we are the Two in the One.

Of course, the life striving in the womb of existence and hopelessly against it, is fundamentally the same whether this life is conscious or unconscious of its striving, of its self. Consciousness has the ability of underlining this striving which, in the eternally-chaotic-order of things, does not in itself constitute a barrier segregating it from the unconscious, and which in its inability to overcome existence produces the two most wondrous phenomena our minds may experience: nihilism and nobility.

On Friendship ~ 6

It is a false belief that the carpenter’s use of tools disciplines the wood into usefulness and purpose. It is on his own body and mind that the carpenter applies his hands and tools, his own self that becomes disciplined in the pursuit of her artistic trend. Following this example, friendship, the art, must first fashion itself.

A Reflection on Modernity ~ 2

Do you really think that those living in hell know that it is hell they are really living in?

Perhaps they were aware of their gruesome condition during the very few minutes, when the contrast in the amount of pain was unbearable, striking to the bones. But then, when everything became routinely engrained in their minds, when eternity stepped in and took claim over their hearts, when their previous life was no more than a distant mirage now utterly irrelevant and unreal, hell became the eternal reality, the pre-ordained order of things beyond and behind which laid nothing but childish dreams.

Such is how things appear for the person living deep in the belly of the modern beast; such is the state of the modern man, with only one distinction. The transition from a childhood—with its dreams, the shaping of its view of the world, its potentialities, its thrill in its existence and its longing to experience ever new things, its playful and originally joyful character, its healthy uncertainties as to “why?”, “where?” and “how?” as it places itself within the worldly stage, as it questions the worldly stage, and its gradual molding to the herd—to the adult, permanent and fully accepted hell as the ultimate reality, is not completed as swiftly as our passage from our world to the beyond hell. The transition unfolds slowly, over many years, without our being conscious of it, without our having the capacity to exercise our critical sense of reasoning and uncover its threads, without our having the capacity of securing a small space for the unfolding of our genuine selves, the securing of our integrity. Our growth is prompted by the nutrition in our mother’s warm milk, in our father’s calm voice, in society which hands confine us behind bricks of its own.

The transition builds itself in us; it settles itself with the full weight of a dead-hand into every corner of our “I.” When the process is complete—when we come to think of ourselves as objects that have thus and thus marking traits, thus and thus potentialities, thus and thus that are looking to achieve, when we come to contrast ourselves with the images and voices implanted in our minds as to value ourselves, as to know how to opine and what to speak, as to know what to aspire for, as to know whether to feel good or bad about ourselves, when the beautiful becomes a tool for acceptance and social success—the “I” is relegated to an “it,” the person to a thing, to an object, and the child has become a fully grown person, a “re-active” part of the herd.

Today, it is this “it” that aimlessly roams the streets speaking through the first-person “I;” it in is this “it” that insanity boils with the shreds and pieces of a mechanic life.

On Friendship ~ 5

A friend must not, for his friend’s sake, betray his own conscience or color his opinion, when in his mind it is plainly painted and free of all shades.

A Reflection on Modernity ~ 1

There’s a room in hell where the hungry man, in his every breath heaving out the vacuum filling his chest, is led to sit at a table where the delicious piles, like the dunes mount over each other amidst wastelands.

And the man, with a clamoring stomach echoing dark, empty, cold, tortured halls, dives into the abundant food, like a drop of water is sucked into thirsty sand, whilst his new masters, with loving eyes pray him: Fill that empty chest!

But the man, whose flesh is numb down into its core, does not feel under his tongue, what with a mechanical movement, his mouth hurls down through his throat. Thus, his belly systematically gets larger, like a balloon being filled with hot air. Nonetheless our man fails to surmount his hunger, and his eyes like a craved wanderer around him roam the smiling fête.

Behold our modern man, forever lonely roaming the desert of his flesh. What later unfolds, your eyes through some screen may catch.

On Friendship ~ 4

Pressing against his heart’s desire a friend, must also at times, aggravate his friend’s pains, and leave his side even if his struggle is coming to a desperate phase.

On Friendship ~ 3

A friend is not merely a comforter, nor is he merely by his friend’s side to share in his tears and joys.