Creamy
Sickly creamy. This is what the world outside felt like as one left it, the way one might leave a bed strewn with dreams, sweaty in the sun, in the full view of the spectres who were responsible for pushing one off.
To control, beyond the bounds of imagination and symbol (always derived from Nature who does not control), every drop of tear, to take them one by one and place them within view (where the spectres have already fixed one's eyes with their wild stare - eyes soon to be feared and hated), is not just a way to be brutal back; it's a way to deaden the sounds of life as it weaves threads of poetry.
Do Not Forget the Whip!
The allusion to Nietzsche may be read with the emphasis on "do not forget", then end in some word, any word, that will convey the vague shape of a particular link. "Do not forget the fragments of life, because these, and only these, can be made into something layered and continuous", as though Zarathustra might have, in his cryptic way, proclaimed.
Let us have scattered memories, then, random thoughts, a diffusion of perceptions. Let us not be vociferous in our confabulation of the good and bad things of the past, lest they be memorably cemented onto the future and be lost to us.
Do not forget the silent starry galaxies, as they tear away from you. They carry the word. Risk the impossible if you would: do not forget the whip.
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall
Therefore, good Brutus, be prepar'd to hear /
And, since you know you cannot see yourself /
So well as by reflection, /
I, your glass, /
Will modestly discover to yourself /
That of yourself which you yet know not of. /
And be not jealous on me, gentle Brutus: /
Were I a common laugher, or did use /
To stale with ordinary oaths my love /
To every new protester; if you know /
That I do fawn on men and hug them hard, /
And after scandal them; or if you know /
That I profess myself in banqueting /
To all the rout, then hold me dangerous. ....
Lines offered by Cassius in dialogue with Brutus, "Julius Caesar", by William Shakespeare.
Cassius, the true and trustworthy, the catcher of worthy friends, the man who takes friendship seriously. Ultimately his need for friendship proves too intense, too much to the point, a mere plot leading to disloyalty and, well, danger.
Aren't the two signs of such friendships that they have the nature of a conspiracy, and that they catch into their fold more than two people: The need always is for a 'clique'; anything less will not be deserving of the high standard of camaraderie and confidentiality.
Let No Sunrise' Yellow Noise ...
... When you die, and you go to Heaven, this is what they give you to drink ...This is from "Sophie's Choice". You might think it expresses religious hope (in a person brought up to feel awe towards man-made religions), or that it refers to wine poured out into a stemmed glass as a symbol of a refined taste in worldly things, or that it is an attempt to reveal deep appreciation of the humane act of offering it; in fact, it simply points to the death that will bring tranquility, Sophie's death.
No hope, but a determination, is what is being expressed.
Echo-Logy
A weblog: the star-shaped thing amongst galaxies of weblogs shimmering away in harmony what seems at every moment to be the last shimmers of Time.
Stars: the things that make the onlooker feel guarded, enclosed, held in and up.
Yours: the intelligent being's Timeless form. Left space to wander tangentially and away from a centre. Your unique orbit.
Passing by in some flying capsule, and wryly resorting to the half-forgotten habit of looking out of the corners of a semblance of an eye (on windows next), there can be detected this thing from the past (the past, is it, or is it a gossamer, a Timeless form), shimmering in complete amnesia, sending one last (forever last) message. The tiny roads, geometry surrendering around the edges to contour, the possibility of triangulation and grid, size mattering no longer, those last shimmers of a thing that's always been imploding, breaking out, showing off its vacuous eye, that dreadful, whimsical wink called Truth, … your eye is a deposit of you that will break out of the capsule yet, will ooze out and form a web, a web-log, a surplus to fly back down, down, right down to an angular thing, a seagull, a lover of ocean green smells and blood red blossoms. Welcome back! You never really left, just replaced one signifier for another; this is all you ever did!
Echo "me"! Let's keep to the rules of the weblog: maintain the style and take it one step further! Close the window now, since the surface will suffice! There's meaning in repetition, as there is a revolution in every regrounding. In this way are we all held in and up, enclosed, guarded, loved.
(I'm deliriously in love with you.)
Only Connect
The idea of a god that is forged spontaneously out of a bond, as we make a wish or pray, or in an act of love, leads to the inference that in an absolute state of being, where ideas subside and presences make themselves vividly felt, the self would experience a solid nothingness, a severance from characteristics that cause reflections of that self to tie one outwardly to life.
God thinning out and stretching over the whole of one's being could never be closer than in such a state. Ultimately, though, the body would rebel, the ambivalence born of material existence would reclaim the mind, which would turn back into itself to seek meaning where there should otherwise remain the only choice a fully lived life experience could provide: death.
God begins and ends in hope and love. In these terms, faith, which consists of the labour of love and the hope of salvation, is never questioned, only deferred, in order that one may come to terms with the impersonal just as well. It is through relationships that meanings - these episodic homages to life - spring up, while in order to comprehend any meaning, one does need to stop, hold back, and stare into the abyss, to "love in the midst of despair".
Perfect poeticism balances itself on just such a narrow ledge between the two states of receiving the impact of a sensation and being engulfed by the sorrow of comprehending the meaning of the transmission. Sorrow is the emotion of comprehension.
Speaking of Nothing
"Nothing" is a natural reply to the inquiry "what are you hiding".
Experiences may be symbolically camouflaged as secrets, held, as something to avoid, in darkness and silence, kept well away because in fact they are so near.
A definition for a secret: That which once revealed turns into its own reason for having at an earlier point been a secret, that "something" that it is outside the realm of symbols, i.e. a horror born of an immeasurable actual distance.
Being secretive is the attempt at matching the uncanniness of the experience with an equal distance created between the knowledge borne by the self and that held by others. The aura of an artwork, an enigmatic expression, the reflection of an object seemingly not there, all speak of the same nothing. Nothing is neither true nor false; nor can it be judged to be good or bad. As it refers to a void, it can only be overcome.
In the realm of comedy uncanny distances or differences are made use of to prompt a laughing response. Laughter is directed at the instance of exaggeration. The situation being in itself funny cannot hold true, except if by that is simply meant that the distance is naturally felt, irrespective of whether or not it is poignantly meaningful.
And That's True Too
If one could visualise one's hopes from without rather than from within, one would see them shaped like a whirlwind. The symbolic act of carrying a magnetic needle when stepping into its vortex could be interpreted in two different ways. We bury us several times before our death, and every time the deformed foetus refuses to receive the last sacraments before abandoning its form to the grave.
The Good, The Bad, and The Lonely
Placed in total isolation where our moral positions and decisions are not taken into account by those around us, we tend to draw a particularly sharp line between the good "others" and the bad "others", while placing all of them inside a circle to which we neither can, nor - in time - wish to, gain admission. Innocence then is defined as the tendency of the "others" to keep as much out of the way of such strict judgmentalism as possible, while we are left with no choice but to look upon a fading world - as in a flame that gradually cools - and to adopt the role of surrogate good and bad people in place of all those whose actions are in danger of becoming increasingly inconsequential to our own existence.
Simpler than Nature
"Am I fundamentally black, with a striped white coat, or fundamentally white adorned with stripes of black?", pondered the zebra, feeling close to discovering the answer. It is undisputably up to the individual. The irrelevance of the fact that the to the eye of the unprejudiced beholder, zebras are simply striped animals may be grasped if we can just imagine for a moment that the beholder's view may altogether be biased.
On the Border between "To Be" & "Not to Be"
Such a quiet poem, a poem of ultimate, utter silence, and yet there is the sound of a voice in this language:
Ample make this Bed./
Make this Bed with Awe. /
In it wait till Judgment break, /
Excellent and Fair. /
Be its Mattress straight. /
Be its Pillow round. /
Let no Sunrise' yellow noise, /
Interrupt this Ground. /
-Emily Dickinson-
How to Live Up to Life
Freedom seems to consist simply of the potential to act in accordance with one's judgment. Wielding the will and the strength to take a particular action, however, is a different matter if only because it may involve others, or if not others, then, in any case, its own echo. Hence it is possible to feel free but not act in freedom, in other words to restrain - or be prevented from - the expression of such freedom.
Life, although too short, is such a sea of possibilities, one would need to be able to develop judgments and then to some extent withhold the action prescribed or ordained by one's judgment so that one could still maintain a hope that by having struck just the right balance between knowing for certain what must be done and remaining open-minded about what will be done, one will have continued to be both the passionate paranoid-schizoid embodiment of a contradiction, as well as its ultimate resolution, thus making the most of life.
Everyday Thinking Refined
Albert Einstein saying of, apparently, a colleague:
"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
Time as the space in which 'everything' is displaced.
They That Love Best
He wondered: Was there perhaps a dialectical framework to be rigged up when thinking about any given dialogue, with the literal meaning, the secret that lodges itself in between the lines, and the remote implications forming the three components?
She asked her father if his 'pal' was chubby! He had to reply that he hadn't a clue what she looked like. This was curious. "How come?"
"Simply because we've never actually seen each other, me and my pal. we just speak on the phone, or send each other emails through the computer."
The daughter - 6 years old - assumed a thoughtful aspect while she was digesting the last words in the conversation: "It was her writing in the computer I found beautiful to begin with." She enquired no more, though he could see that out of all the details of the secret that had been laid open for her to ponder, the notion that people could become interested in each other through 'good writing' was the one she found fascinating and which left her with thoughts and ideas...
There was abundant projection of love from him onto each of the two. Each was steadfastly resolved to grow, one upward and out, the other inwardly. He wouldn't exactly abandon all hope, which is not an operation to take on anyway; rather, he played out his despair against hope while waiting for the last call.
Alice II
.....`No, no!' said the Queen. `Sentence first--verdict afterwards.'
`Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. `The idea of having the sentence first!'
`Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple.
`I won't!' said Alice.
`Off with her head!' the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
`Who cares for you?' said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) `You're nothing but a pack of cards!' .....
Each of them is the centre of her own universe. The Queen is at a disadvantage, because she is but one card out of a pack, and she must suffer, guessing at the thin substantiality of her existence. In Alice's case it is the dream: Developing obliquely, gaining size, as it were, through a mental process, of which, finally, there would be no outward sign.
Fortunately for Alice, her dream is already a lingual one, so that to recount it in "after-time", as is envisaged by her sister at the end of the book, is simply a reaffirmation of what she already knows as a child: Development consists of mediating one's encounters with the meaninglessness of the world in a meaningful way.
The Ghost of Shakespeare
From notes by J. Joyce:
"What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners." ...
Ghosts have fixed identities. Even with an identity forever etched into living memory, you may yet turn into a ghost, in which case your identity only serves to have you better framed - as a sketch in a "wanted" - or unwanted - flyer is.
The chapter containing Stephen's causerie on Hamlet seems like the core of Ulysses, as if everything else must have formed itself around it. Nothing less might have been expected of Joyce: to be motivated, through something Shakespeare wrote, to find out what moved Shakespeare to write it, and to create Ulysses in the process!
Said of Whomsoever It Might Concern
His mad flight,
At the perfect hour,
Into the tunnel of light,
Reflects cunning, no matter how dour.
“Back to dreaming!
Never!” - conjectures he;
“The siren’s singing,
Is well expendable, and I will end up free!”
Thus cherished mementoes
Are rendered insignificant
While the chasm grows
Deep into him, master of sincere cant!
A Question of Style
Adolf Eichmann speaking the words below while testifying in his own trial, must have sounded just like any other individual devoid of imagination who's driven by his passion for truth.
When one is rightly or wrongly - doesn't really matter which - accused of or known for committing some act, it becomes imperative that one develop the right style in which to speak about it. This is then what forms the essence of what one becomes in their own mind. It's a way of becoming one with the surface of things.
" .... They were building little wooden shacks, two, maybe three of them; they looked like two- or three-room cottages. Höfle told the police captain to explain the installation to me. And then he started in. He had a, well, let's say, a vulgar, uncultivated voice. Maybe he drank. He spoke some dialect from the southwestern corner of Germany, and he told me how he had made everything airtight. It seems they were going to hook up a Russian submarine engine and pipe the exhaust into the houses and the Jews inside would be poisoned.
I was horrified. My nerves aren't strong enough ... I can't listen to such things... such things, without their affecting me. Even today, if I see someone with a deep cut, I have to look away. I could never have been a doctor. I still remember how I visualized the scene and began to tremble, as if I'd been through something, some terrible experience. The kind of thing that happens sometimes and afterwards you start to shake. Then I went to Berlin and reported to the head of the Security Police."
Alice
It may well have been Humpty who asked Alice (though it may just as well have been the other way round) whether it was the king who gave orders to his men or if the guards dictated the law to the king (as well as to the subjects)... To always act the individual, no matter what principle is or isn't at stake, and to dignify your stance with taking the heroic death wish to its logical conclusion! Alice would have been more doubtful, more ironic, and all the more wonder-struck at her own fall.
The Soul of Lead
"I have a soul of lead, so stakes me to the ground I cannot move."
-Romeo and Juliet-
How can a SOUL of lead possibly stake one to this too, too solid ground?
Shakespeare evidently knew how!
Full of Sound & Fury
To stand before the authority on future events in one’s life must be an awesome experience, more so if one’s fate were pronounced as being irrevocably sealed, condemning one to failure and doom, with no possibility of salvation.
It is conceivable to speculate as to what might have been the outcome in the tragedy of Oedipus if at the outset the Oracle could have been differently interpreted, its advice ignored or taken in any selective manner - at, say, particular junctures not necessarily in the same way as is commonly recounted.
Oedipus, the suggestible youth, might still have attempted murder of one parent and incest with the other only so that as a mature man, taking heed of the prophecy (perhaps, in accordance with the text, once it was disclosed to him), he would be driven to make himself faceless in revulsion at his own deeds, or in order to seem unknowing, to feign inconspicuousness.
One could take out the prophecy altogether, focus on the mind of Oedipus as the epicentre of filial trepidations. One could imagine the actual, concrete problem to be the existence of irreconcilable differences between the parents who would be participating in driving their son over a precipice with a forcefulness he could not help but be conquered by. Oedipus, running away from a fading reality, stumbling on the surreal world of parental disaffection and estrangement, then wishing to establish himself as present – having hitherto been absent, and feeling the urge to do so through the sort of knowledge by which riddles are solved, by comprehending and resolving a conflict that was really out of his hands to mediate, would indeed be running a risk of being doomed to a heartrendingly tragic defeat. His choice of method of mediation would be determined by external forces.
When you are caught in the middle of an argument of which neither side is comprehensible or agreeable, you may decide to remove one opponent and appease the other, though you still have to see the conflict through if the whole exercise is to make any sense at all. Thus Oedipus might somehow remove the more fearsome, less comprehensible parent figure, but this would only lead him to identify with the same, to replace the parent he caused to be stranded in the past, and to reclaim the status quo which was so plausibly renounced only to be reinstated and understood once and for all in the present. The only alternative would consist in his retreating into a hiatus and yearning to be reborn in a new, tension-free state of bodily and mental bliss.
The Oracle’s prophecies are invariably fulfilled. Life, considered as a unique experience, as an existence lived and looked at by an individual, even if multiplied, is but a tragic circumstance in space.
Religions proclaim the possibility of salvation for the soul, and their proclamations ultimately ring hollow. Salvation does seem meaningless if there are precise instructions on how it is to be attained. For timeless spiritual unity to come about, it must come as a free gift for all, unannounced, surprising as well by its being shared in an equitable fashion among all, as by the fact of its having always remained and continuing to remain outside the scope of speech. It is contrary to death, the common tragic fate of us all. Death is foretold, reported, discussed, forestalled as much as possible, explored as a process and imagined in its finality or as a metaphor. Yet it surrounds us, not as fulfillment, not even as judgment, but, as the finale to the unique experience of the individual, in utter isolation. Only in this way does it become death, absorbed and absorbing, but outwardly remaining the other’s experience. As far as we know, “there is no such thing as a natural death.”
