On Water

The river, in his loud rush when through rocky grounds, fails to listen even to his own sound, is too consumed in his thinking to feel his feet furiously beating the ground. It is later, when his incessant breaking softens into smooth grounds, and when his breathing slowly calms down within his raging chest, that his shouts, whispers and silences that have previously escaped his mouth, slowly begin to accumulate before his eyes, that he feels the wind gently caressing his watery face, that he feels serenity seeping into his every vein.

A river is a collection, a union, of many streams.

I wonder if the river ever attempts conversing with the stream. The former is too strong, too loud, the latter too weak, too faint. Yet, both of the same body are made.

Death, the Ruler ~ 3

To speak of the death of life one must first address its origin, the life of death. A reflection that has — hitherto, and with few exceptional cases, animals — made death even more abysmal, life more fleeting and existence more difficult to bear. A reflection that has “necessitated” mask of God or science and, instead of being a begetter of weight in existence, of life in full and in health — we live once after all — it has pushed everything out of sight, into future, into past, into oblivion, into death.

Life Beckons

Attempt the unthinkable will I,
this mind from its image untie,
from its framed life release,
shatter and like a beast through the fields,
unleash.

Some Characters and Mine ~ 1

It is of the character of the strong to blossom, declare strife, make wine, when battling in the womb of defeat, when weighed down by world and odds, when left with no roads but one, sown with deceivers on every side and leading up through the highest-most-dangerous-steeps.

Some Characters and Mine

It is of the character of the weak to seek intoxication, escape, suffocating of awareness, when defeated, when weighed down, when faced with no escape.

Growth, Flux, Inevitability ~ 4

It is of the knowledge of misery that the poet in hymns sang and wrote. In her arms, he said, laid sage, lover and drunkard of every age. No man shall know his worth, his metal, himself, unless kissed by lips reeking with the smell of death. Then and then only might he see, feel and live beauty amid atrocity, freedom amid fate’s clasping hands. Only then might he say “I am” and smile while looking deep, while listening to woe in his veins breathing deep: “I am,” like a mellow tune rises from the bellow of his heart and flows on to the far away ocean of eternity. See it in his eyes, you can: there, one who with his flesh embraces inevitability; amid her thorns his body he lays and sings joyfully. Cold dew the dawn breathes on his face, “I know,” he replies as he joins the caravan of solitude; in the fields of joy he then sings with the birds: “misery, I embrace thee; misery, whole you have made me.”

Growth, Flux, Inevitability ~ 3

Rapture always takes over me when I, after a long and patient wait, finally behold the lightning, like whips discharging their sharp edges into my inside, when I hear them thundering, flashing their cries out from the caves of my inwardness, when I feel the wind inside the walls of my chest faster and faster racing, and when I see my horizon entire filled with grayish clouds. Now I know that rain is coming, that my drying rivers will again burst with fresh waters of becoming, and that the dirt of life caught in the corners of my memory will wash away to that infinite ocean. When the storm rages in my valleys I stand before life changed, free and feeling.

Notes from a bleeding heart’s book written at night

At night, when the mind comes to lay his head on his pillow and, in sleep rest, the heart awakens from his forced slumber and, casting his potion of voices and images into the mind’s cell, he laments the dying breath of his flame, the iron chains clasping the beating of his veins.

So it has been that a great many selves,
like deep-dark-caves are hollow
but of the echoes of nearby towns.

I saw a painting lively conversing, deeply questioning, and passionately arguing with the hand giving her form, shape and life. From their voices and impressions it transpired that both were joyful in their sadness and assured in their doubtfulness. Once the conversation was over, the painting showed a face smiling and crying while gazing out into the infinite horizon.

Sedimentations

Individuals, as epochs, cultures and histories, are wrought, made of residue, of clay, through a biological, social, cultural, and historical never ending process of sedimentations that inside their bodies accumulates itself in infinite ways. In this chaotically-deterministic process of forces, uniting and disuniting, the bodies formed by sedimentations as such are never the same, eternally unequal, each as unique as a star in mid-summer’s sky, and hence a choice, differences in values from one body to the next, values directly tied to the forces that fashion each particular body into shape.

Amber Asylum – Riviera

The World

Strange, from the ridges of my inwardness I found the world entire gazing into my eyes, playing in my heart, and still, in every step I took out in the world, I found pieces of myself fragmented here and there, now in the corners, now in the streets, now in the squares, now in the eyes of people walking everywhere. “Out” is where the world unfolds, said I to myself, and out too unfolds the human, as his body grows to leave his body, and as his eyes, ears and flesh from his memory erase the old to make way for the new. Strange, then, how in the fields of my inwardness the world in ease slithers, plays, and giggles as I to what he says give meaning, and place on the stage that I call the world.

Our Current Condition

To experience whatever is left of the human, to discover the remnants of man’s fractured ego, it is inevitable to unchain, within one’s mind, within one’s experience, the human from the image of the human.

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.