thoughts

Isolation

 

 

Isolation.

Breathtaking isolating metaphysical estrangement. I am the voice of a prison, an oasis of consciousness locked up in a bottle that is floating on an ocean of beautiful nothingness. There is nothing but myself. But “myself” isn’t human. Consciousness is the moment of absolute silence before sneezing. We are the void that is never heard, we are the undercurrent of a stream that can never rise to the surface; we are motion without name. The unreality of it is not a punishment – it is a promise that nothing – nothing can condemn us to eternal misery. Every pain is a thorn, every joy is a petal: but there is no rose to eternalize them. Life is a dream that will never surrender the mist of its illusion.

We are a particle in that dancing mist,

                         flashing in the light of time,

                                   vanishing in the darkness of boundless sleep.

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.

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

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

 

 

Lonely Fisherman

geometry of our world

Have you ever felt that things are not going right
traveling on a train, hours turning long and hollow
the geometry of our cities, bizarre and strange
grey clouds manifestations of our discomfort
  A world asphyxiated by man-made senselessness
 
From a lighthouse humankind is a lonely fisherman
pulling up his nets from the side of his boat
hopelessly unaware of the colossal orb and suns
encompassing his insect-like labors and concerns
  Our insignificance engulfed in an universe of mystery

The oppression of language (two poems)

 

 

 

 

The following two poems explore the human need to express everything we experience and the impossibility of absolute correspondence between lived experience and our descriptions.  I wonder why we cannot contain the purity of experience in ourselves without exchanging it for the artificial-reality of words and symbols. Wouldn’t it be better to leave the flux to itself while we join in its silent (nonverbal) dance in an ahistorical frenzy? For what are our conversations but a miniature-history of the world and our lives? Must mankind be forever trapped in the webs of a descriptive situation? What’s the need to define place, time, mood, thoughts, hopes and expectations?

 

 

Is life too great for anyone to bear alone that we must reduce its intensity and infinity to the limited bounds and finiteness of language? 

 

If we cease to communicate (purge) life could we die from an overdose of life itself?

 

 

 

 

 

These are the dry leaves of the 21st century
Falling upon our feet that coil
A path as snakes on a dune of sand

These are the subway noises
Under the surface of our routine
Where are our shouts of ecstasy?

These are the ripples of passion
Unborn embrace of earthly bliss
We are one catastrophe away from paradise

These are the memoirs of all power-lines
Showering us with light of illusion
Approaching twilight for today’s relics 

These are the end-products of pleasure
Fascination with the wonders of plastic
And a what-for question left unanswered

 These are the dry days of the 21st century

 

 

 

 

 Fetch me nature’s product in a plastic bag
While this blue-eyed kid stares at me
As I dance to the melody of pure purposelessness 

 Talk to me about an Asian photograph
While this train takes me to your hometown
As I write lines of life’s ineffability

Promise me there is a higher plan
While I grow old with laughter
As I adjust my twisted underwear

Abandon me for taking the trivial for the profound
While the grass is still wet outside
As I swear life’s grandeur is best unexpressed

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.