death

Tinges of blue

I left the office shy of two o’clock

gaining inside a shudder that could reach

just beyond the boundary of solitude.

I raised this old neck of mine

the sky was me.

Belonging to dreams we no longer dare to glimpse

futures too powerful too bear

fears that out of plain habit

covered me like husks of wisdom.

So eternally blue – with the intensity of an S

similar to the smell of dawn, depths of now

bright as selflessness

blue as sky.

A kind of rejoicing, a mystic’s forgotten book

and the glory of erased words!

TO return, live a thousand sleeps

one more lonely death

varying degrees of godless hours

those dissipated moments

hungry of freedom, so easily obscured.

Bury me in lands of mute plants.

Blind pasts, unimportant futures.

The sky was me, I turned

I had gone away… hands overflowing possibility.

Go back to Beyond Language

Corner’s spiral

Come trace each spiral’s end

the emptiness of every word

fullness of rippling chords

wondering, strange wondering

those that once were

where has the smoke of their pipes

traveled?

To them we were distant dream’s child

a rising vapor over their colossal deaths—

serene nocturnal sounds

Gathering ink droplets

over prayer’s whisper

and the fall, rushing leap

bottom deep darkness into

deep immensity’s embrace

Violin growth of love

the stream naturally light

flight upon mountainous sleep

crossing threads of cycles and returning

Entering moment’s origin

returning every minute

arriving over and over again.

The day the universe was reborn

Why keep writing in linear and logical fashion?

Writing is the outgrowth of thinking.

It should reflect the features of the human mind, with its desultory and fluctuating discourse.

When the scope of the possible has been exhausted you may turn left where a gigantic mountain separates the desert from the snow. Haven’t you felt all along that lurking behind every monotonous experience an explosive energy awaits to come forth? It is as if a powerful surge of lightning remains dormant in a recondite quarter of our consciousness; behind every yawn of boredom a rapacious thunder of delight seeks an entrance into our deaf lives.

Follow the rain into the heart of the storm. Then you will be ready for the revival of the new, the rediscovery of surprise. As long as there is room for the unknown, as long as red-headed ants surprise you with wonder and interrupt the tyrannical flow of thoughts — there is hope.

I had begun walking in search of meaning and not far down the road I stumbled across an insurmountable obstacle: mortality. All labors are in vain if they seek permanence. This did not stop me, if I should live in a world where impermanence governs every particle of matter then my actions had to resign any sort of structure, my words had to abandon order. I had to accept the chaos of uncertainty and resume the search. No longer looking for a perennial philosophy but merely for temporary wisdom. For the most profound questions I never looked in books; I was lucky to experience them in other more fundamental objects: in direct contact with the phantasmagorical landscapes of nature or the silent dark of outer space.

Sinking in rocky jaws

Patagonian mountains

Lakes as seas

near heaven’s azure

the universe reborn

million lights at night

transform every thing

Living in constant disbelief I could but interpret life as total dream, the whole of existence appeared equally inconstant as the contents of any bizarre dream. Yet I am sure that defining the cosmos by the anthropocentric analogy of dream doesn’t come close to what is really happening — reality is much wilder and exuberant than our speculations. Here and there I found evidence to believe that the hardest task is change: inner transformation. We are never the Archimedean unmovable point around which all things change and evolve — we are similarly watery being flowing from one state to another. Allowing things to change within you, permitting things to grow and decay inside was surely difficult. Getting used to this internal impermanence requires great courage. The reward is priceless: the art of transformation had become the real art of living.

At night things settle down. The pure transparency of water is swallowed by the black of night and slowly above a blurry streak of light convinces us of the utter strangeness of our condition. The Milky Way, our home galaxy, becomes the symbol of our astonishment. In those prolonged moments of silence things are perceived differently, we are free to just be as rocks are silently existing at the bottom of a blue lake.

Is it so necessary to formulate our wonder and our wishes?

Immobile (time)

Serene (space)

a rock for ages

deep below

in abysmal Zen

Sometimes I refuse to endure the recurrent agony of dreaming my death. In times like those:

Deserts become too desolate

Mountains intimidating monsters

Cities caging of beasts

Oceans too restless

Home insipid

My grave a terrifying

inferno

I can only live and die

within my despair

My daemon: despair. My savior: wonder. My meditation: inking a few random words. My sleep: sweet forgetfulness as the rock that rests unperturbed.

I have to ask, is The Search a consequence of despair, or despair a consequence of The Search?

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

A line of thought

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.

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

Behind the Chaos of Creation

I was dark as a gigantic shadowed mountain

I was impenetrable like a frozen ocean

I was silent like cactuses in a desert of nothingness

I was absent as the cold sleep of death

I was static like an atom between galaxies

But I was not alone, not abandoned

We were lovers, young and passionate

We made love, through and through

Our bodies flew away in the agony of pleasure

Then we both, in the horizon of thought

Disappeared like gods behind the chaos of creation.

Hopeless eyes

From this region here to that other geography
From this sober dream to that brittle philosophy

From this silly present to that uncertain future
From this strange human to that evolving creature

From this labyrinth life to that simple death
From this fleeting day to that final breath

What consoles my hopeless eyes?

Confession of Horror

I am afraid of the world

I am terrified by its size

Its unpredictability

I fear its mouth

It’s going to swallow me whole

I am surrounded by a wasteland of panic

I am going to perish in agony

Alone

What can I do but wait

Endure

Survive the intense torture

This is rape!

The world is raping me to death

I am paranoid of the Chaos

I have no control…

The riddle of death

Stand, paralyzed
Under midnight’s neon
The wind is cold
Your lungs filled-with fear

The voices of the city silent
But yours angry and desperate
Then you say:
I was not meant to live
For I know not how to die

Silly mortal questions
Burdensome and disquieting
Aching uncertainties
Interrupting your sleep

How serious can it be
To die and nevermore be
Have we trembled for naught?
Expecting a snake
Which was only a rope

Sleep has come, today is born
Lost in duties, whatever follies
Unaware of future’s scheme
Nothing matters but this instant