Poetry

Underground Paralysis

I might be mistaken, but I believe there is much to fear in the course of our lives. It is a fear that wine, parties and television might distract from our attention but they will never annihilate it. Most philosophies of despair tend to denounce the ABSURD as an inexorable quality of our advancing lives. It is, in fact, this irrepressible motion forward though cycles of interminable triviality that the despairing existentialist complains about, and makes a living by declaring the banality of earthly life.  It is fascinating to think that in recent times the attitude of wailing has been adopted by many clever writers, and we, as audience, enjoy reading about our impotence and frailty.
Anyway, the fear I mentioned does not arise from the intellectual awareness that the things we do in life have no permanent meaning or from the existenliast´s lack of trust in the frenetic impetus of time. It is a feeling only describable in metaphor, it is only visualized in representations of the deepest horror:
 
You are not moving
not advancing
but the color changes
grey to black
the purest black
the deepest deep
each tick of the heart
marks a step further
into a maze of incomprehensibility
like an universe empty
no stars or galaxies
only a demonic silence
a cognitive paralysis
an underground turbulence
 
You reach out for help
piercing the dark horror
trying to hold on to something
your hand blindly advances
at the end of your fingers
 a river of pain…
having crossed your multi-layered mind
and light-years of voidness:
 
two options,
if you scream you drown
asphyxiated by the thick weariness,
or
you marry silence
isolated indefinitely
in the cruel awareness
of your inexplicable
existence.

Turbulent Purple

The fiery afternoon had transformed itself into a turbulent purple. How else could I describe it? It had no other name than Turbulent Purple. I am by blind necessity bound to call it by that denomination, I am a slave to that ambiguous name. Leaping in and out the oblivious space of mind, short and poetically vague sensations occupied most of my purposeless time. Without explanation or warning I could read in the papyrus of thoughts scriptures such as these:

           
            Centuries of dancing shadows
            Has the strong wind of fate
            Extinguished Man´s recurrent dream?
 
Ah! From where do all these voices arise but from the nocturnal?
 
How senseless it is to reveal in words the impenetrable mystery of the mind, how lame an attempt to reproduce the wilderness of wonder. The afternoon had turned into a Turbulent Purple and I became sure the existence of written language had no purpose but to express the shock of our encounter with reality — it could never explain a thing. So, without regret I had survived numberless fears of imminent death so I could experience once more the unnatural beauty of nature.
 
Ha! So many years organizing my thoughts so that in my final despair I found every cell in my body to have a life of its own and my thoughts faithful pilgrims in the inhospitable lands of paradox. Therefore I studied my body with care as if it were an extraterrestrial lump of matter and completely gave up the hope of a systematical account of human experience. Then I focused again on the sky and the world was still a turbulent purple. It was not long after this that for the first time I started doubting of the ancient and perennial pillars of art. It seemed to me that if all things go wrong the last desperate redemption would come through art — art had a special bond with the essence of all experience, it embraces the whole multitude of feeling and all genre of action and yet it transcends them all — or so I thought.
 
“Life and death for art” would have been my motto two years ago. But in my rebellion against all dogma the mutiny of doubts turned against my ideals and the sky of my convictions became turbulent — perhaps purple to a spectator of my consciousness. If myths, religions, wars, slavery, races, countries, continents, suns, and galaxies all have an allotted time, art surely is as ephemeral as the rest. Alone and destitute I stood while the echo of a turbulent purple sunset reverberated in the coffins of memory. At last I got rid off the most obdurate preoccupation, second only to death — namely, life no longer lived for art, love, money, fame, joy or by instinct alone; it seems likely to be here for no reason in particular. One last thing remains certain:
 
               Returning from the underground
               Reflections in echoes
               From the pit of despair
               The fountain of wonder
               The irony of this paradox
               From the art of Nature
               Conceived the death of Art
               A dying fire. . .
                       Turbulent Purple
                          turbulent purple

If…

If stories had some sort of reality I would narrate my dissolution amongst the heavenly bodies; if fantasies were not merely fictions I would vanish careless in the wind; if words were not all vain and empty I would tell everyone that life is a bubble of dream and we are nothing but footprints on sand.
If changing the world meant anything I would form a new republic; if truth existed I would refute the philosophers; if god existed I would be fearless to leave this world…
On my 26th birthday. January 7th 2008

City Walls

urban_hermit_poetry

I have abandoned everything
  like a monk with weary eyes
I am a hermit within the city walls
Tall towers of light are only columns of dreams
I have fled from the horizon
            to study the core
I am tired of all the signs –
  In a falling leaf
        the whole universe is summarized.
Don’t wake me up!
Let me sleep in my rich delusions
   Let me be like dust
        that never had a name
            it never spoke a word.

A line of thought

medusa

We haven’t reached the spiritual vertigo of Zarathustra, for in his abundance of knowledge became weary of too much wisdom; nor are we broken down by so much grief as Titus had to endure. We are not too small to be completely insignificant, nor great enough to awake with daily pride. Our real circumstances are somewhere in between the extremities, our toils are not fully tragic or heroic.

We battle through the repetitions of the calendar and if we strive to send out a message, a moral for our collected personal histories, what unclouded expression can give meaning to the facts of our plainer existence? What, for instance, is the final message of the universally acclaimed films of Forrest Gump or Amelie? What feature in their unwinding plots seizes the spectator’s mind-body and synchronizes its fictitious reality with our own living novels? The former film is a wonderful exposition of the Ying-Yang character of any human life, yet in the end the legendary up-and-down events of Gump’s life become simply a background for the truly memorable moments of his life as he describes them to his life-long love: gazing at the stars at night, contemplating a sunrise, running by a crystalline lake, and surveying without distinction the earth and sky. The latter film from the onset exposes a lover of life in her most basic and simple experiences: sticking a hand into a sack of beans or skipping pebbles on water.

For both films, besides the eternal search for love, these aforementioned singular and unpretentious experiences somehow seem to magically justify the turmoil of existence, our inevitable mortality and the lurking solitude that hides away in every human heart.

But while Zarathustra, Titus, Forrest and Amelie lie tranquilly behind the surface of a book’s page or the film’s screen, what is for the true mortal being the climax of his life? When do we find the ultimate recognition of our satisfaction, and if we do, are we able to leave behind forever the racing dream that we have called our daily reality? In other words, once we find a simple reason for our being, can we then allow it to return to non-being?

The search for fulfillment needs not reach the extremes of intellectual inquiry of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra or the emotional explosiveness of Shakespeare’s Titus, perhaps our day to day lifestyle will be enough if it be endowed with sufficient awareness, a recognition that behind our meals, offices hours and snoring sleep an intuitive beauty akin to what Forrest and Amelie felt in their rudimentary experiences is available to us.

After all, is not the triviality of the familiar set before the grand theater of stars and galaxies? Is it so surprising that this world as it is, is just enough, that we need seek no more, progress no further, attain nothing more…

Had today been the last day of this earth and we the living saw and participated in the last scene of this earthly play, would not every last smile turn into a divine sign, every last meal a most sacred ritual, every last conversation a most treasured bible, every last kiss a most unnatural miracle.

The potential of the ordinary is quite extraordinary once we acknowledge how rare and marvelous is our neglected existence.

Wonder Eye

Could we motion our awe
present it hourly along our way
Could we breathe in astonishment
the minutes streaming by
As the moon today is half-dipped
in the layers of blue crisp sky
We must throw away legions,
innumerable attempts,
since it is mostly rare
that we define existence
             by wonder
If we could raise our eyes
as frequently we raise our cups
the impenetrable azure
or the eternal dark
may become one day
             our source of belonging

Traveling at night

 

 

A black umbrella
my sky
The moon
another street-lamp
Sleeping houses
populate my horizon
Following the curvature of a continent
the window is my pillow
My eyes
magnets attracting
the elements of the unknown.
If the clouds
scatter and break the sky asunder
into a thousand little islands,
If on top of trees
the world below would not be so strange
I would visit every cumulus bay
every rising branch…
How far must a man go
to find out what he seeks?

Do not approach me

I’m surrounded by an atmosphere
not of air but of stone
the vastness of the Existent, breaking
falling upon me like an avalanche of lead
I am compressed, the center of the earth
knows nothing of this tremendous pressure
Exhausted under this weight
words fail, expressions useless
Science’s theorems futile!
The Milky Way hangs on my back
There is no abyss sufficiently deep —
I am the lowest vortex
All objects crush me in their fall
Here’s the dungeon of gravity
            Do no approach me…

Heavy Steps

painting_dreams_lost_man

Old and brittle man
walking alone, hands behind back
dragging his feet, stooping his head
as the town of Itacaré swam
in melodies of reggae, seasons of breeze
Poor old man, stumbling amongst thoughts
entreating pain to numb his soul
so as to never suffer harshly
from the whip of regret —
Why does sadness allow me to forgive you;
come here old man
sit by my side, listen to the stars
there are still things your pain
                     will never mar

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