It is impossible to remain coherent. It is an effort beyond human ability – and wonderfully convenient, it is only humans that desire coherence. Life, if you allow it to be, is too intense; and if you look for the words to describe or preserve it, then this intensity travels from wonder to monotony. There is not one single day that is ordinary – only because we are so intimidated by existence that we willingly enter that repulsive state of awareness called “normality”, which is to say, a trivial encounter with known and familiar objects. So, hours may seem like pleasant arenas, where nothing may occur too unexpectedly; but certainly the night comes, or leisure, or what bothers us immensely: waiting comes and hours turn into monsters, ordinary things into blasphemies. We then need to escape, leave this desolate stability; we need chaos, disorder, frenzy! Why? Because all along we’ve faked our pretty little ordered world. We did not want to see things too deeply, we ignored them so we could continue our 9-to-5 placid existence. So, when our hypocrisy is too heavy to bear, we desire madly to return to the world we ignored – we want to embrace the enigmatic, to unite with what is becoming and does not yet bear a name. So we rush away from ourselves only to wake up the next day sick with regret, as if we betrayed ourselves by indulging too much in the irrational. We bounce from one end to the other, grasping for complete coherence on the one hand and on the other, we strip ourselves naked for our plunge into unadulterated confusion. We are unable to leave permanently the false illusion we’ve created, but we fear to stay too long at the other shore, where laws, customs, languages, thoughts and egos break down.
Materiality is the common road. We tread its trail; we pursue the scent of rock. We are — these two words so inappropriate — herders of demise, we are bearers of disease. For what delicious goal we repeat the nausea of our desire, for what exhausted orgasm we repeat expectations for the future. We are really bound to this world of rock and air, we are truly sterile penises focused on ejaculation, while knowingly incapable of delivering results. And however putrid the atmosphere of habits may be, we continue in them, we wallow in boredom – because someday, we like to imagine, our collected decay will metamorphose into beautiful bliss. That day will come, we say hollowly to ourselves, when the sacrifice of wasting time will pay off and we can excuse ourselves by declaring: I had no choice but to wait.
So, what are we waiting for? We are – again these silly words – nagging children passively waiting for chance or fate to transform, deliver, or elevate this all-too-familiar playground into something we are not ashamed of, something that is more dignified than us. This is clearly shown by the regret and emptiness felt after festive events, after the euphoria of drinking and eating, after the ecstasy of sex, after the pleasure of spending – what’s left is only a longing that comes from a weakened being, somehow mutilated by its indulgence in these material things. And this road that we’ve fashioned for our descendants is barely challenged; we dare not look straight into the eye of our times and threaten these irrational and immeasurable cravings. We will always find alibis to justify our lack of concern, we will be too distracted, too immerse in this playground of pleasure to be blamed for our negligence. Yes, we care for matter too deeply, we’ve placed it at the center of our consciousness…
The last remnants of this bitterly afraid body, this ambiguous mind, this capsule in which the entire universe seems to exist – and outside, beyond the surface of this inexplicable skin, a blank void, a dark emptiness, a vicious silence. What in the end is the point of this unending preoccupation to make sense of what is finally unspeakable, to exist in a vast and profound space with miraculous shapes and forms, to breathe and beat a heart relentlessly while the plot of an unwritten play unravels — before these eyes full of wonder? However vainly the hours may pass, oblivious of the impending death of my surroundings, the death that will also come to this entity that strangely calls itself “I”; vain attempts to forget the inevitable, to resist the irrevocable. Had this self been able to escape permanently from the entanglements of disaster, had this ego renounced a borrowed language and survived brutally naked without philosophy, without history, without tales, without spoken love. Somewhere within the entrails of this phantasmagorical reality lies a reflection, a foundation upon which all things past, present and future are sustained, nurtured and consumed; it is a realm powerfully un-human, destitute of qualities and because of its effortless existence it remains sovereign above all things that strive. And maybe it is a joke, to conceive or imagine some sort of reality that will remain after all of us are gone, some sort of metaphysical ground by which our passing away seems less painful, less tragic. There might not be any foundation for the fear, the awe and the effort; every act, every thought, every failure is essentially groundless, and we are and will always be an unnamable race, an indefinable being.
I had to give up the futile attempt of telling the story of alienation; of describing an uncharted state of confusion – newly born since today is new and has never before been lived. Only recently I had begun to understand the system into which I was born, spontaneously thrown into a configuration which is perceived as bizarre shortly after one is capable of analysis. And I am baffled to discover that the very faculty that has allowed me to unveil the absurdity of these circumstances is the cause of the environment I find myself in. The sharp razor of analysis, calculation, planning, prediction… the distinctiveness of our species, the pride of our ancestors: Reason itself, master and artist of modern civilization, creator and ruler of this world of laws and symbols. So powerful, yet so deadly. I had thrust myself into the arms of such deceitful guru, only to become prisoner of a disease… caged in thought, lost in chatter. With the torch of reasoning I explored the corridors of the modern world, I studied the interior of today’s machinery, and I probed the shallowness of our desires. Horrified by what I found, I stood still…. a sun slithered down the gilded sky, cars followed a steady line… waves of intangible information flowed by.
The world is changing. It is evolving before our very own eyes. We are carrying out a plan that we inherited – a plan that has no foreseen outcome but is continued only because of an illusion, perhaps the hope of progress, or some euphoric moment of fulfillment awaiting us in some distant corner of the future. Or is it comfort and laziness, fear of challenging what was given to us? Inertia compels us to accept the system, a system that is clearly cruel, indifferent and disheartening but at least it gives us survival, a chance to carry on with our lives without suffering too much. Nonetheless, this system is expanding beyond our control, we cannot see an end to our technological societies, feeding endlessly from our endless desires. We submit to a system we don’t understand but is presented as trustworthy, worthy of the highest respect… the ultimate goal of collective existence: civilization. And why? Why should I accept this intricate system of highways transporting money-seeking creatures, why should organization be preferred over chaos and spontaneity?
I’ve learned that any set of beliefs is relative to tradition, an environment endowed with the authority of time (or feigned timelessness), a community of believers that reinforce the belief with repetition, indoctrination, in short, education… and based on what, the authority of their opinions, their convictions based on the solemnity of their forefathers’ expressions, and so on, until the very necessity of proof is vanished because tradition has been instituted and a full circle has been completed. Tradition contains the “truth” and that truth was begotten by the unchallenged belief of generations which granted tradition the authority of timeless revelation. I’m not only thinking of religion which is of minor concern nowadays. Tradition in the form of greed, individuality, progress, happiness; any principle by which we can govern our lives. Doesn’t it make sense that our calculating minds, striving for one fulfillment after another, have adopted this behavior after years upon years of learning the same old ways of our immediate forefathers? And can we continue using the moral imperative of “ought to”, we ought to be happy, we ought to be successful, we ought to be reasonable; in modern terms, we ought to be well off. How can we again insinuate some sort of collective ethics, when every purposeful ideal is always biased, wrought by individual preference and thus, completely inadequate for generalization?
In universal terms, in the metaphysical urgency triggered by poetic insight, in silent contemplation that destroys the metanarrative of cosmic history painted by science and rationalism, when the grand picture of the universe is captured in one unified indescribable awareness… in that state which is short-lived but long-lasting… and to view a queue of cars, the sidewalk wet by rain, the sun tainted by clouds, the air still, all these and yet none of these. When nothing seems like a necessity, anything can be challenged, overturned, changed — beauty that has no structure, no rationale
…. a sun slithered down the gilded sky, cars followed a steady line… waves of intangible information flowed by.
Beyond Language 
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