Journal entries

Joy of Participation

From the dark cloud
   that was my death before my birth
From the impervious past
   that is my womb
From nothingness void
   that sprung my being
      into this magnificent universe of light
As I awake
   from the caverns of dreams
My eyes visit
   a strange changing realm
Vision has kindled
   the torch of nature´s stage
Amongst crowds, streets and trees
   silent contemplation reveals
the daily world (of chats, smiles and meals)
   as mysterious as death and the galaxies;
on this planet
   repetition has blunt the miraculous
Frightening as it is
   this irrepressible human world
never to forget
   it belongs to a greater whole
Small is our size
   but great our joy of participation
       in this universe incomprehensible

Lucian Freud

lucianfreuddetailself-portrait

 

Impressions upon a visit to Lucian Freud´s exhibition in Lousiana, Denmark.
Solitude is heavy, our subjective isolation is inescapable. The eyes gaze nowhere, time trickles away, endlessly. The only task left for these subjects is to endure the blankness of temporality. For time flows so slowly it appears to be still. There is no resistance, a species of quiet resignation, the carnality of their human condition is effortlessly lived. Their globular faces weigh them down as if they were made of lead. The overworked faces manifest the elimination of all activity; which has turned life into a simple and plain permanence.
There is no despair, just a timeless patience. An imposed fortitude in the regions of choiceless existence in which they sojourn.

Freud-dog

 

LucianFreudGalpainting

 

 

The impossibility of faith

This is a statement made by one of so many human creatures that roam this earth; and it is the belief of the author of such statement that opinions are ultimately relative to their background, therefore limiting “the impossibility of faith” to a narrow discourse that is and will be shared only by those that have a similar mental constitution, in short, those that share the rare tendency to doubt, question, and challenge all forms of knowledge and experience.

 

So, without complicating the matter too much, what is, in brief, the impossibility of faith all about?

 

To convey opinions through the awkwardness of words, one must first of all be able to express the circumstances from which the opinion arose. This provides the reader, first of all, access to the frame of mind needed to understand the opinion. So, before you judge too quickly the impertinence of my opinion (the impossibility of having religious faith), I will present to you my humble case.

 

I adore religion; it has fascinated me both in my youthful years of religious piety as well as in my later years of recklessness and agnosticism. I’ve lived both sides of such opposite worlds, I’ve had to cross through the tenebrous chasm that separates the comfort of a religious established life from the frightful unknown that constitutes the emptiness of near-atheism. I haven’t become an atheist, I cannot confidently claim that there is no god or that there is no supernatural reality. I simply withhold my judgment and allow a blank white space to fill the answer. I have fallen prey of the impetuous force of the scientific method, which as sound as it may be in this day and age, I admit, I still hold some caution against it. I’ve written before about the limitations of science and won’t dwell on it here. But to finish the point, it has impressed deeply on my mind and I cannot dismiss it easily however skeptical I am about its capacity to resolve the mysteries of human life.

 

Even after I started to doubt every religion or religious claim, I continued to have a respect for religion, a secret infatuation for the solemnity and profundity that religion usually conveys. After a suicidal and conflictive adolescence, I finally came into friendly terms with religion again, but this time from the perspective of a spectator and not so much as a member. For the last seven years I’ve had the great delight of studying and investigating the religions of the world, uncovering so much wisdom that is to be found in the poetry, symbolism and narrative of religious thought and feeling.

 

So, what makes me today say that it is impossible to have faith? Faith is complicated to analyze. From a reductionist point of view, I can affirm like many others that religion is nothing more than a social phenomenon to keep the members of a community or society passively functioning without rebelling against the system. (the opium of the people, as Marx once coined it). Other rational views establish faith as the response to fear, the necessity that arises from the fear of the unknown, the fear of disease and death, fear from the impotence man has in a world full of dangerous forces that can easily upset his petty order. Another view is that religion is a genetically wired aspect of the human psyche, that we are bound to create religious system because of the evolution of our brain. Other views establish religion as the longing to return to a previously lived experience of totality (such as when we were fetuses or infants, when the differentiation between ego and the external world had not yet been firmly delineated). These are all views I’ve learned from others, they have not actually been developed by me. Nonetheless, they all point to sensible possibilities… religion as universal as it is may have an identifiable cause in one or all these theories.

 

What I’ve concluded is that you don’t need to invalidate or refute religion to be able not to believe in it. Religion is simply a matter of insufficiency for many of us. Fortunately or unfortunately, we don’t have the innate passion to submit to the religiosity of the blind believer; we are unable to digest the nectar of spirituality without some trace of justification. That’s why for some of us religion is not received with disgust, simply mistrust. We need not dismiss it by some rational argument; we are simply waiting for some kind of revelation that will allow us to embrace it wholly. The revelation or justification can come in the garment of rationality or in the euphoria of irrationality, yet without it, we are unable to have faith.

 

The impossibility of faith is not an a priori dismissal of religion as false. It is the incapacity to believe in the precepts of transcendence without the arrival of some signal, a manifestation physical or psychological that can make us say: I see everything clearly now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A prospect of madness

 

 

 

Would you call me mad if I can confess of a certainty in the prospect of the future, even when I fully acknowledge that the vicissitudes of Time can easily outsmart the most rigorous mathematical prediction; yes I was sure that in ten years’ time I would be looking back to this very same day – today – as the fantasy of a naïve child’s imagination that mistook the nature of reality for that of a game: haven’t I erred in my conviction that life is best lived through the transformation of its contents into those poetic representations that plunge me into an ecstatic state of mind, in other words, in trying to grasp life by its tail by scrutinizing every tottering thread of Time had I not missed the meaning of reality by inspecting it too minutely, too unsparingly as to leave out of the range of my investigations the global experience of existence?

I saw in that Delphic vision a day when all these conglomerates of experience that surround me today would be no more than the debris of a vanished Past, a trivial irony that would have no more power to excite my cynical laughter. That day will come when I rent a paltry hotel room in Belgrade, killing my time with a lousy inexpensive hooker and when night comes I will stare despairingly at the ceiling wondering if abandoning my youthful delusions was a wise choice, since by then I would have purged myself of any prospect in the road of human creativity and would be living in the pulsation of every naked minute, suffering like every other human being in the claws of the beast of existence. And every so often I would glimpse outside my window to see a crumbling civilization and I shall utter words such as these:

Withered petals gliding down
Breaking from their cone
Into scattered puddles in the street
Let each petal leave my rose
Each desire run away
All sorrow, regret and concern
Vanish below –
What is it to me that we must die
Why should I carry the burden
Of Fate’s indifference to us?

 

Sky of Poetry

(July 11th – 2007)

 

And I’m still alive. Standing on a dim-lit bridge watching with disbelief the fantastic horizon as the fiery star’s return is heralded by the tones of pink, purplish-red, tawny and azure pigments in their respective order from horizon to zenith. It is 3.09am, and the moon is manifested by a thin ark of potent white, the rest of it obscure but visible: its entire orb can be witnessed from this bridge that overlooks on a magical lake hazily imitating the transcendental beauty of the sky. Below me two ducklings swim in the still water, small insects flutter around me, the glorious architecture of Copenhagen stands immobile while, progressively, this pen inks a few words as a substitute for a photograph, a camera that I do not hold now to share the explicit mystery
                        Of this solitary view.

The Mold of Reality

THIS IS HOW I SEE IT…

Artists, poets, musicians, philosophers, scientists – in short, anybody who creates becomes a sculptor of human reality. They all exhibit aspects of human life that are present – or possible. One life is not enough to survey all the possibilities that can be brought upon the living experience; we must share with each other the Spectrum of the Possible, because we need more than two eyes to visualize the totality of human existence.

 

In a world where most men and women are concerned primarily with “making a living”, that is, having enough money to buy stuff and have sufficient comforts for raising a family; in this world the prospects of poetry, pure science, art, philosophy become irrelevant, if not insignificant, at least, secondary.

 

But my view is contrary to this widespread carelessness. I conceive life as this:

 

We are a crowd of gazing eyes all found in the depth of a lush valley. Most eyes are focusing on the ground, ensuring that each step is safe, reasonable (and profitable!). But amongst this majority of conformists there are a few visionaries that focus on more than just the flatness of the ground. These few are studying the trees around, gazing at the stars, describing the colors of insects, monitoring the motion of the wind, and endless observations take place that are ignored by the mass of robotic somnambulists. All these irrelevant and beautiful things the minority gazes at are equally real as the beaten path most walk upon.

 

To end this metaphor I kill everyone and then ask the reader to capture what human life would have been without these few wanderers:

it would only be a muddy track of monotony.

 

 

 

No complex forms of nature (trees), no immensity of space (stars), no microscopic detail (color of insects), no invisible mystery (motion of the wind), etc.

ONLY A
MUDDY PATH…

This is the importance of the poet of human existence, of the artist of human potential, of the musician of the human imagination, of the genius of human exploration. They give depth to human life, they bestow on reality a wider dimension.

 

Some come upon this rotating planet to fill the mold,

                                                                Few others come here to fashion this mold.

 

You, me & Montaigne

It bugged me. I was looking for a vague unformed idea with the same persistency as you would recall a forgotten dream, a dream you had vividly experienced and now all trace of it is lost except for a blurry intuition that claims it existed and was real. So in the same way, I am looking for an idea I’m not quite sure what it is; but I know that it exists and it is real. The idea has something to do with History. History has been on my mind recently. It is impossible to dismiss history when its presence is unmistakably obvious in the prints of books. There have been many before us. So many that the vast majority have perished within the confines of thier solitude and few or no traces are left of their struggles and dreams. I’m interested in how humans see themselves. It may be called their Interpretation of Life. The fact that we live is obvious and granted. But what we think about life changes dramatically from one skull to the next. With so many distinct opinions I do not worry of finding the correct one. All seem to have a likely possibility of truth. But what is truth anyway? A forgotten quest of ancient philosophers… Our age does not worry about truth. It has lost its relevance; we pay attention to other things. So I’m not looking for truth, I’m sure of that. It has to do more with an understanding of how the human interpretation of life changes throughout history. I’m gathering opinions rather the same way that an entomologist would collect beetles. No beetle is more precious than the others, each one of them exist and are as real as the entomologist that collects them. How to make sense of the numberless interpretations of life?

I think I’m getting closer to my forgotten dream: my unformulated idea.

There are many kinds of beetles in the world. There are more beetle species than there are fish, amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal species put together. How did so different types of beetles arise? Our age explains the varieties of species with the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution has been so popular and successful in explaining many aspects of our natural world that it has propagated over many other fields. Technology, ideas and the development of human societies can all be explained quite clearly from an evolutionary perspective.

The evolutionary perspective
 

 

Time is a bitch. We cannot define it, yet our whole lives are tyrannized by the ticking of the clock. Elusive in definition but very real and concrete in practice. Time is a fact. We live in time. Calendars and alarm clocks bind us:

“I need to wake up early tomorrow”

“I’m late for work”

“Let’s meet at five near the fountain”

“Next week is my birthday”

“If I don’t finish this in time, I’m in deep trouble”

And so on…

Time is very real. Listen to your own voices. We mention it every single day.

 

But we forget about time.

 

We forget that time is not only seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. It is also decades, centuries, millennia, mega-annums, and giga-annums. The universe is a very old place. It’s been here long before any human ever stood erect. It will probably be here long after every human life has been exhausted.

Awareness of the long extension of time is important to understand the various Interpretations of Life.

That’s how I can begin to make sense of history. Through Evolution in the broadest sense of the word. There has been enough time for everything to evolve. Every atom on this planet evolved from the interior of dead stars, life arose for the evolution of simpler forms to more complex ones, and societies, language, ideas and technology evolve from rudimentary human communities spending enough time together to develop these attributes. Given enough time a lot can happen. This is the Evolutionary Perspective. An interpretation of life common among those living today.

We are bound by time. This interpretation of life helps me interpret the interpretation of life of others before me.

Thales surveyed the world around him and declared that it originated from water

Berkeley surveyed the world around him and declared that everything you perceived is not the real world but only your own mind.

Freud surveyed the world around him and declared that a blind unconscious force called the libido directs human life.

And so on…

Every opinion in your head has a history. Every hair in your body has a history. Every word you say originated somewhere sometime, and if you create something new the long chain of causes behind it supports it. If you adopt the evolutionary perspective, your every move is united to the most distant past.

Now I’m getting closer to what I really wanted to express. Not a theory but a melancholic reflection.

On March 1st 1580, Montaigne completed his ‘Note to the Reader’ for his long and voluminous essays. He set his pen (or feather) down and submitted himself to the currents of history. On May 11th 2007 I opened his essays and began reading in English his ‘Au Lecteur’ translated from the French. Something about that date shook me. 1580. Long time ago. A long time ago this man set to write down his ideas and experiences in countless pages. Four hundred twenty-seven years later I pick up his book and read in the thick darkness of midnight till my eyes dropped with exhaustion. Today I woke up with an idea on the tip of my tongue. Trying to shape it and give it a name. Montaigne, a man dead for four hundred fifteen years, influenced my Monday and if you are reading this, he managed to sneak into your life too; changing the course of your life ever so slightly, making you sit before your computer ten minutes extra than you had planned for.

If you adopt the evolutionary perspective, your every move is united to the most distant past.

Montaigne is an example of a life that has been recorded and has been able to influence people in the future. But the number of people that achieve this is negligible when compared to all those that leave no trace and return silently to the dark abyss from where they came. We like to think that life is Great. That it is worth living and that so much of it is special and worthy of commenting. That is why we meet up with our friends and tell them what we did, how we feel, what we hope for. It is sad and discouraging to think that our most troublesome struggles and our most dazzling joys will be lost completely and in five hundred years they will be of no use to anyone.

We are an island of consciousness engulfed in the ambiguous ocean of time.

I find something else discouraging. Of those millions and millions of lives, the lives of the masses that died in plagues, wars, and famines and remain in the history books only as a number:

8,000,000 dead in the Thirty Years War

75,000,000 dead after the Black Plague

100,000,000 dead during the Atlantic Slave Trade

and so on…

What about their Interpretation of Life. They had an equally valid opportunity of experiencing life, perhaps in the most atrocious circumstances. Their thoughts and yearnings are now lost under the memory of a number.

I’d like to compare all those opinions. The lush forest of conceptions that each skull harbors. There are as many as beetles in the world.

Is there a God?

Is there a soul?

Is there an afterlife?

Is there a purpose in life?

What is matter?

What are the stars?

What is happiness?

Every one has something to say. Every one has a right to that opinion. And every opinion is part of the legacy they inherited. The evolution of all forms and shapes; from the hair in your head to your thinking in verbs, nouns and adjectives. We are bound to the most distant past, perhaps too to the more distant future.

Whatever you do today, think what role it will play in the great course of things. When you pay for a pack of cigarettes, think of the journey the coin is about to embark upon. Perhaps a thousand years from now, that same coin is going to be dug up by a future archeologist and speculate about life at the beginning of the 21st century. Gaze up to the sky and imagine all those that have done the same, some seeing the wonderful creation of God, others the grand excitement of space, and others still, the unbelievable profundity of the human mind. Kiss your lover and wonder when the first human kiss was invented. Eat an apple and speculate from what distant tree it came from. Spit out its seeds and consider that in fifty years a child might be swinging from its tree branches.

Now go, and explore. Be part of the unrecorded history that unwinds daily…

The Great Unknown

There is a startling recognition in the first blink of the day, when the eyes open their lids, raise the gates of secluded darkness and the light-rays of colors come streaming into the cognizance of a new day. This recognition I speak of is far from definable, it is the unspoken conviction that life is altogether unknown and new. I awake to a new day, a new series of uncoiling sensuous experiences emerge passively from all around me. I say passively because I do nothing and the whole world around me pours into my consciousness like a voracious waterfall falling into a crystal diaphanous pond. As soothing as the morning light is it announces a silent scream urging me to interrogate my commonsense, to question my convictions, to ask this futile conundrum: where does it all take place? But as soon as I ask this query and reply with words the question loses all meaning. It is not a question to be answered by the wit of our words. It is a question answered in silence. It is to stop repeating compulsive nonsense in our heads. It is to remain still and perceive whatever 
 

IS….

And remain there. |Silent|Still|Calm|Quiet|Mute

Where does it all take place… forget about what you know about the mind, the body, consciousness, the human brain, the weary heart.

Focus on your perceptions in the same manner as you would look at a flowing river… nameless, ineffable, and unutterable.

THEN…


I come back to my computer. And write about it. Baptize it with names and riddles. I call it:

  

 

Apocalyptic Vision

A curious reflection took place in my mind earlier this evening. As I was watching a video about the ancient Greek and Roman arts a terrifying and threatening thought came to mind. Let me try to capture the sequence of this reasoning. The Greeks attained such perfection in sculpture perhaps unequaled in subsequent times. They idealized the world of man and conceived a universe of harmony, balance and beauty. They portrayed the human body in all its subtleties and achieved an uncanny realism in the reproduction of the human form in three-dimensional space. Yet in all their glory they also acknowledged the frailty of men. Even their gods are seen as creatures that battle with an ongoing conflict within themselves. Their sculptures often present the contradictory impulses of the rational and irrational in men and women. They urge us to restrain our insatiable whims with the bridle of Reason.

The Greeks are remembered and identified by such ideas. I was left wondering what ideas would identify our age. What monuments have we created that, if they were to survive the caprices of Time, would speak for a set of ideas that were born out of the last few generations. I speak of the themes of despair, existential anguish, cynicism, and the awareness of transience. Since the times of the World Wars artists, writers and thinkers left a bitter flavor in their creations; our collective self-esteem has not fully recovered from the blows of those violent times – in fact we still live in such times. Perhaps human history has and will always be a story of wars and catastrophes. We also recognize a turbulent loneliness and alienation inseparable to the world of globalization and capitalism. Our advanced technology enables us to become fully aware of our brutality and all these modern themes become unavoidable to any spectator of the world. Do we have any monument that will reveal this to posterity, as the Pantheon makes us recall of the Roman adoration for absolute perfection in the Heavens?

That’s to be answered by those that shall come. But at this point a startling and dreadful possibility interrupted my meditations. Even if our age has turned slightly pessimistic and lives in a perpetual state of convalescence, has it yet considered the possibility that it will not survive? Didn’t the Roman Empire with all its grandeur and power fall to ashes and now lies in ruins? Why are we to suppose that our current liberalistic society will prosper to the end of time and not come to a disastrous finale?

This possibility seemed very real. Our current ideals of materialistic prosperity might not be the most wholesome and can one day, in times of desperation and lack of resources, claim the whole world as its prey and our world: only another rotten carcass of a deceased civilization.

Let the millennia tell the truth…

The origin of inspiration

 
 
The eternal present.

Unfortunately, it is only a transitory condition I am sometimes blessed to experience. Far from being a permanent state in which I find myself, it is only in those divine moments when I’m totally centered and aware of all that surrounds me that I sigh, and stunned, silently pronounce my astonishment.I had such a moment today. Perhaps all too short since I started to describe it in words. I was traveling from my home to my work office. I’m lucky enough to pass every day through a mountain hill that allows me to view part of Costa Rica’s central valley in great depth. The view is breathtaking. Mesmerizing. It is enormous, the mountains, the slopes they produce and the great plains that support such monstrous pieces of rock. I wasn’t sitting near the closest window to such view. Between my eyes and that sight that I so highly revere was a row of bus seats and in one of them sat a young girl. Far from obstructing my view, it enhanced it. I could compare the magnitude of the geography I was musing with the size of a small human being. The result was that of making the sight even greater in size and significance, and my identity as a human smaller and humbler in feeling. It was there, the greatness, the majestic quality of this planet and it faded slowly as the bus rode down the hill and entering a nearby town. Now only a memory of it remains but the power by which it shook me still permeates my breath…