thoughts

Bamboo

 Even though it is immeasurable
       My prison is still tight as skin
but my horizons wide as silences

Although it is incomprehensible
       The moment is clear as pain
but the mountain inside cold as ash

Since I have known only one
       Many drops fall as from bloodshed
but the fragile division was born as orphan

Nonetheless I was lover of the loneliest desert
       Counting the walls that serve as mistakes
but swallowed all the scriptures that read as noise

Thus, metaphorical speaking aside
       The clouds raised thoughts as mothers
but motion now seems so still as bamboo

 

Return to Beyond Language

They were there…

There they were, shattered

      sidewalks murderous sidewalks

frozen in their disorder, fractured by black color

     and had to reach down

        and pain their unfeeling scars

but this is not about sidewalks,

               it resembles that primordial awe

or the seven cold nights of tribesmen

         it intimates with old necessity

and the heavy mist that kills without moving

   because further down by the hollow blackness

            of cracked sidewalks and rapid decay

desasosiego, was called once in Spanish

           spontaneous hymns of indigent earth

shadowless religions with no clouds on their backs

       noiseless disaster tamed by echoed habits

stepping beyond – further into hopeless air

                 and with it, the truth concealed

hidden encounters with the ultimate Inexplicable

        certainly having probed the depths of terror

the animosity of rebellion and the flakes of solitude

      in what seems like ages of torment and desasosiego

         by the unknown light of trembling – hardened

frozen and broken like irrelevant sidewalks

           forgiving the ancient errors of willing blindness

alone, amongst these detached blocks of cold cement

           my finger slithered their gaps,

and call me mad, lost and nocturnal – again,

           I was nowhere, in calm beauty:

my irrelevant isolation.

The world’s a machine


^ A by ytuquike
http://ytuquike.deviantart.com/art/A-32785575

 

Let me tell you something. It may be a hard pill to swallow. No, on second thought, maybe my criticism is hollow and attempts to belittle a world too powerful to be challenged. Besides, most people are already aware of what I’m about to say. We all are. But it doesn’t matter. I must get it out; otherwise I’ll wallow in my own disgust and perpetuate a system too cruel in its indifference. 

I‘ve been sitting here for seven hours. Patiently chatting with customers over the internet, satisfying their demands, answering their recurrent questions. Yeah, it’s as simple as it sounds.  A few minutes here with a Dan from South Africa, a few seconds there with a Marysia from Bulgaria. I’m connected to the world but between me and the rest of the globe there’s a box that displays organized patches of light and allows me to interact with people I will probably never encounter, physically or virtually, again. It’s just that – organization – that bothers me. Here I am at the threshold of a global society and my enthusiasm is imprisoned under a thick layer of discomfort.


It doesn’t make sense to me. How we got here and all that. I was involuntarily born into a world that had organized itself in this way without my consent. Here I am functioning according to it, adding fuel to its monstrous engine by my insignificant but necessary participation in its affairs. I am a mere appendage to this colossal machine, a machine that keeps rolling on and on without any constraints – makes me wonder if we could stop it should we desire to? 


That fact is that it is here, an organization a priori to my existence, and I must operate according to its rules; my life with its sufferings and joys must fit the frame of modernity; my dreams are shortened by 40 hours a week which are mandatory for my basic survival. I’m no utopian, I don’t trust in any universal remedy for happiness and prosperity, yet even with my mistrust in progress I’ve perceived the approach of a conviction that promises a better world, a saner reality.


Hadn’t fear regulated most of our expectations, or if habit wouldn’t paralyze our imagination, would we still be living for minimal wages and restricting life to those scarce hours of leisure that work “allows” us? While trapped in those routines of cement and asphalt, how often do we get to experience the beauty of nature which, according to poets and sages, delivers endless moments of delight and communion with the divine?


I don’t know, I don’t care. I will continue to intoxicate myself with the monotony of uneventful hours… who cares what a screw thinks when the machine can operate without it. New screws will be born to furnish The Machine with the elixir of eternal life, namely:  

Our conformity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Return to Beyond Language

Children of nowhere

Those rotten truths and the atrophy of written words

life is outside the inferno of cadaverous literature

the ever-increasing waste of past thoughts

attempting impossible resurrections

                            free the world from fossilization

allow it to burn and dismiss its ashes

our best experiences are never contained

            they roam beyond the frontiers of definition

close those covers of inky nothingness

            step into the bare unadulterated flux

                             mend with the unknown

Flee from cages of routine and metropolitan nonsense

recognize the hollow of every day

            reject the veil of prospects and careers:

                              usurpers of wonder and transformation

children of nowhere

            creators of ambiguity

exorcise the daemons of logic

                             celebrate your insanity!

 

Go back to Beyond Language

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

Awe and confusion swirled together

pain

Pain by Hands of Crimson (deviantart)

We fling ourselves out into the depths of this tumultuous motion (there is always an implicit decision to stay alive) – we are agonizing in the effusion of forms, attitudes and energies of this world, we succumb to the simultaneity of all events, approaching a boiling point which will end in a devastating orgasm. This life that with relentless power can lift you to regions of unshakable astonishment will drop you with equal force into the pits of boredom and suicidal retreat. It becomes an experience so intense that all those wonderful insights attained by your constant awareness to the profundity of existing forms can be, and will be, torn apart by the abysmal fissure that comes in between reality and our conceptions. Our epoch has demystified the themes of history, art, philosophy, science – any study that pierces Being and divests it from the shallowness of routine – themes we are engaged in by our simple breathing and acting  in a world that is constantly being measured, recorded, discussed and because of these, it is being doubted more than ever.
 
 

 

 

Out of the circumstance of standing on the axis of what is to come and while repeating beyond illusion the experience, over and over again, of existing as part and parcel of this monstrous universe – out of all these circumstances there arises a sentiment which remains for the most part unspoken yet when united to the urgency of our desires it wishes to break through as a divine voice, a repercussion that will echo through the immensity of space and time, an outpouring of this vital disbelief that defines our existence; in short, an eternal statement understood and recognized by everyone:
 
 

 

 

Can all this be real?
 
 

 

 

Exactly because the world’s diversity can only be matched by its incomprehensibility the human being, passenger in life, is unable to remain in the state of absolute veneration (the all-too-common fear of the unknown) and must distract himself with whatever nuisance is thrown in his way. Fortunately, there is excitement in monotony; there is pleasure in painful depressions.

 

We are obeying something vastly superior, something that always exceeds our two modern poisons: reason and technology. We aspired to imitate nature with those silly contrivances. We, subjects to our bodies, to history and the course of the planet, we return to bed every night insulted simply because we cannot deceive ourselves much longer: the world we have come out of has created itself and us without the tool of reason; and in that inexplicable unreasonableness it has fashioned machines infinitely superior to our latest technologies – we see it all around us, the biological world, a miraculous product abandoned by the silent God of Purposelessness.

 

After we finish with this continuous enigma, we open our eyes to challenge again the naked world, to tease it with our actions and desires….
“oh what a world” we say,
 

 

 

and reenter the game once again.

 

 

Go back to Beyond Language

Timelessness

Unable to escape this vast dawn

hanging upon me like an atmosphere of chemicals

a mechanical tingling from ages’ past

I’ve collected the motionless quantum of floating seeds
constantly mirroring the pinpoints of valleys

as seen from peaks of departure

I’ve spoken with the dark red shade of tomorrow
perhaps seducing despair to taste my blood

her choice fluttered like a hummingbird’s thought

I’ve fallen in those perimeters of wonder
unfelt timelessness

incapable of resisting the language of rising steam

The old skins of trees invade the territory of sense
while curves vague as clouds

              embroil this journey’s end.

Go back to Beyond Language

Trapped in nothingness

It seems to be I am locked inside this excessive silence. That while I look up into the hazy azure of the sky or into the windy skies of night I discover an impenetrable void, a silence that cannot be breached, a solitude that is here to stay. My arms plead with desperation for a sign, my ears are on a pilgrimage in search of a sacred word – a confirmation that life can be trusted. A revelation or miracle that can transform these wild gyrations of nonsense into a lively and trustworthy universe.  Long tunnels of agony and atrophy seem to be the destiny of those that aspire to awaken and revive human life from its muddled lethargy. But being trapped inside an inescapable chasm, I have only the ignoble expanse of space to address and all of creation turns its back on me and answers back in SILENCE. I am not insightful enough to interpret my own frustrations, I cannot tell if it is a general trend in this new age or if I stand alone in this inexplicable confusion. Furthermore, the only remedy comes in strings of lyrical eruptions that at first sight seem vague and meaningless, but are in fact projections of the real ambiguity and hollowness that resides deep within. It is unnecessary to find coherence when one is no longer servant to the tyrant of reason, it is superfluous to propound theories when the intellect is too weak to grasp reality. So, the image is inevitable: floating in cold nothingness, silent solitude. A journey through emptiness, a constant motion through space finding every now and then a naked planet, an aura of beauty and patiently collecting the dust of time in expectation of a glorious sun – surrendering to the all-powerful ground of being.

Fatalism

If we must submit to the irrationality of following all logic to its end, conclusions may turn shockingly paradoxical. I once heard that we have chosen our life from the very start and that our experience on this planet is simply the revelation of our original choice. If this were true then the absurdity of our suffering would be justified since we have chosen beforehand to experience it. The question that remains would be: why have we forgotten our original choice? Why does life present itself as an unknown unfolding instead of being the realization of one’s desire? By some obscure mechanism our original choice has been obliterated, life remains a permanent surprise. At first this seems like another form of fatalism except for the fact that we have chosen that predetermination. On the other hand, most people believe that the universe is a spontaneous happening and we must choose our way through the hazards of spontaneity. Our life is the result of all our choices, but how do we ever get to choose anything? I sat down the other day to think this one over and I discovered that my choices are really just reactions to whatever is presented to my mind. From the pettiest choices to the most important decisions I simply obey a feeling, logic or a whim. In all of these cases I am subject to what simply happens inside me. Should I buy a black or blue pen? I wait for a moment, experience a certain sensation of pleasure in black and I buy the black pen. Should I live in Costa Rica or in India, I wait for a moment, a logical-emotional labyrinth emerges in my mind and by the end of this involuntary frenzy, I make my decision. Naively speaking, thoughts are like emotions, they arise involuntarily and by a law of their own. Most people are identified with their thoughts, but if you ask them how they fabricate a thought they must inevitably answer: it simply happens. So, if my decisions are nothing but reactions to what is presented to my mind, what is allowing these perceptions? If we submit to modern scientific thinking, to explain a perception in the human mind we must pursue a long path through Psychology, Sociology, Biology, Evolution, Neurology, Chemistry, Physics, and we will end up with an ultimate theory for the universe as seen by man. In very simple terms, what we experience is the result of the whole arrangement of the cosmos, and if we knew every bit of information about this arrangement, we could predict ourselves. Again, we fall into an unremitting fatalism.

 

 

But what’s the use of all this reasoning and the contemporary compulsive adoration to logic and reason?

 

 I choose not to know.

 

“Puppet on a string” by Steve Whitney

Machines

 

 

And to know and see and reassert that we ARE machines, we are machines made out of flesh, proteins, water, enzymes and coded molecules; that we understand the word “machine” but cannot grasp the consequences of this mysterious arrangement:

             Living, breathing, suffering machines…