time

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.

An Attack on Science

 

Science is based on an unscientific judgment of value. Science and its followers claim that knowledge and truth about the world are only possible through the scrutiny of the scientific method. Therefore, all other sources of knowledge are doubtful, if not, downright mistaken. It eradicated subjectivity from its grand representation of the universe and claims to speak as matter-of-fact and objective as possible.  However, the scientific enterprise has still to prove why we should deal with the cosmos as a problem to be solved; it has yet to answer why knowing is much more important than any other human activity. The great technological benefits we enjoy today are not at all essential; we clearly see the animal world enduring without vehicles or television, or notions such as gravity and entropy, such ‘animals’ even have very complex societies or innate flying abilities. Therefore science cannot claim to be the ultimate route to a better and wiser life, it is a historical phenomenon existing only for the past few centuries and not necessary to life on this planet. In this sense science is morally unscientific; it cannot provide evidence for why a scientific attitude is more preferable than, for example, an aesthetic or nihilistic one. This is simply because science has not been able to predict human emotions or chart our future decisions, it has nothing to say about what we should do; it merely states what is not what should be. 

Scientific-minded people believe themselves to be the most rational minds today. They have associated rationality with one method of inquiry (i.e. scientific method) and have abolished all other sources of data and knowledge. This seems to me more like a limitation than an advantage, precisely because science cannot deal with the whole spectrum of our experience. It works simply on the observable external phenomena and has yet to contribute to an understanding of human consciousness. It pretended for many centuries to get rid of this uncomfortable fact but the shadow of consciousness has crept into modern physics and it is now clear that even basic physical concepts such as mass, distance, velocity, time, are dependent on an observer. In a broader sense, rationality should encompass more than just science and its mother logic, considering that science is narrowly limited by its inability to connect with our whole experience of life. In other words, we are aware of things that the analytic mind cannot formulate. The rational discourse of science is incomplete; it cannot be the entire picture since it lacks insight into our inner life which is as real and undeniable as the external world. For this reason we can learn about life equally as much from a scientific treatise as from a novel, a poem, a kiss or a beautiful landscape. 

—

(This is not an attempt to invalidate science but simply a reminder that the powerful mystery of life cannot be grasped from one perspective. Those that are dedicated to the exploration of existence must remember: there are no official paradigms; we alone bestow authority to whatever we choose to believe. We cannot limit the cosmos to certain aspects of itself, it is beyond our attempts to reduce it to one knowable thing.)

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.

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

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

A prospect of madness

 

 

 

Would you call me mad if I can confess of a certainty in the prospect of the future, even when I fully acknowledge that the vicissitudes of Time can easily outsmart the most rigorous mathematical prediction; yes I was sure that in ten years’ time I would be looking back to this very same day – today – as the fantasy of a naïve child’s imagination that mistook the nature of reality for that of a game: haven’t I erred in my conviction that life is best lived through the transformation of its contents into those poetic representations that plunge me into an ecstatic state of mind, in other words, in trying to grasp life by its tail by scrutinizing every tottering thread of Time had I not missed the meaning of reality by inspecting it too minutely, too unsparingly as to leave out of the range of my investigations the global experience of existence?

I saw in that Delphic vision a day when all these conglomerates of experience that surround me today would be no more than the debris of a vanished Past, a trivial irony that would have no more power to excite my cynical laughter. That day will come when I rent a paltry hotel room in Belgrade, killing my time with a lousy inexpensive hooker and when night comes I will stare despairingly at the ceiling wondering if abandoning my youthful delusions was a wise choice, since by then I would have purged myself of any prospect in the road of human creativity and would be living in the pulsation of every naked minute, suffering like every other human being in the claws of the beast of existence. And every so often I would glimpse outside my window to see a crumbling civilization and I shall utter words such as these:

Withered petals gliding down
Breaking from their cone
Into scattered puddles in the street
Let each petal leave my rose
Each desire run away
All sorrow, regret and concern
Vanish below –
What is it to me that we must die
Why should I carry the burden
Of Fate’s indifference to us?

 

Poem in rain and cosmos

 

Why must raindrops fall
and stir my soul like Debussy’s piano,
delirium in an orchestra of round ripples
each droplet unites with the puddle
in this unknown street of Nygårdvej
Why can I not resist this temptation
Of studying the motions of a
                                           fluctuating universe

I raise my head a few meters
a different world comes into view
a realm so close but so inexplicable
of these men and women of modernity;
so you see two worlds bound together
One as ancient as numberless time
The other new by cosmic comparison

And worst of all, I must confess
this thing frightens me above all:
the road mankind has fashioned for itself,
that relentless evolution of man’s world
not long ago we lived flat on a finite earth,
now the cosmos has expanded to insane proportions
we are a micro-dot in a cold dark shadow

Are children aware of our ancestral roots
before we were in trees, but now
riding in motorized wheels
is there a Nostradamus among us
who will reveal the end of our obsessions,
or will it never come to an end,
like this puddle should turn into ocean
                                       if these drops from heaven
                                                                   never cease to fall.

You, me & Montaigne

It bugged me. I was looking for a vague unformed idea with the same persistency as you would recall a forgotten dream, a dream you had vividly experienced and now all trace of it is lost except for a blurry intuition that claims it existed and was real. So in the same way, I am looking for an idea I’m not quite sure what it is; but I know that it exists and it is real. The idea has something to do with History. History has been on my mind recently. It is impossible to dismiss history when its presence is unmistakably obvious in the prints of books. There have been many before us. So many that the vast majority have perished within the confines of thier solitude and few or no traces are left of their struggles and dreams. I’m interested in how humans see themselves. It may be called their Interpretation of Life. The fact that we live is obvious and granted. But what we think about life changes dramatically from one skull to the next. With so many distinct opinions I do not worry of finding the correct one. All seem to have a likely possibility of truth. But what is truth anyway? A forgotten quest of ancient philosophers… Our age does not worry about truth. It has lost its relevance; we pay attention to other things. So I’m not looking for truth, I’m sure of that. It has to do more with an understanding of how the human interpretation of life changes throughout history. I’m gathering opinions rather the same way that an entomologist would collect beetles. No beetle is more precious than the others, each one of them exist and are as real as the entomologist that collects them. How to make sense of the numberless interpretations of life?

I think I’m getting closer to my forgotten dream: my unformulated idea.

There are many kinds of beetles in the world. There are more beetle species than there are fish, amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal species put together. How did so different types of beetles arise? Our age explains the varieties of species with the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution has been so popular and successful in explaining many aspects of our natural world that it has propagated over many other fields. Technology, ideas and the development of human societies can all be explained quite clearly from an evolutionary perspective.

The evolutionary perspective
 

 

Time is a bitch. We cannot define it, yet our whole lives are tyrannized by the ticking of the clock. Elusive in definition but very real and concrete in practice. Time is a fact. We live in time. Calendars and alarm clocks bind us:

“I need to wake up early tomorrow”

“I’m late for work”

“Let’s meet at five near the fountain”

“Next week is my birthday”

“If I don’t finish this in time, I’m in deep trouble”

And so on…

Time is very real. Listen to your own voices. We mention it every single day.

 

But we forget about time.

 

We forget that time is not only seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. It is also decades, centuries, millennia, mega-annums, and giga-annums. The universe is a very old place. It’s been here long before any human ever stood erect. It will probably be here long after every human life has been exhausted.

Awareness of the long extension of time is important to understand the various Interpretations of Life.

That’s how I can begin to make sense of history. Through Evolution in the broadest sense of the word. There has been enough time for everything to evolve. Every atom on this planet evolved from the interior of dead stars, life arose for the evolution of simpler forms to more complex ones, and societies, language, ideas and technology evolve from rudimentary human communities spending enough time together to develop these attributes. Given enough time a lot can happen. This is the Evolutionary Perspective. An interpretation of life common among those living today.

We are bound by time. This interpretation of life helps me interpret the interpretation of life of others before me.

Thales surveyed the world around him and declared that it originated from water

Berkeley surveyed the world around him and declared that everything you perceived is not the real world but only your own mind.

Freud surveyed the world around him and declared that a blind unconscious force called the libido directs human life.

And so on…

Every opinion in your head has a history. Every hair in your body has a history. Every word you say originated somewhere sometime, and if you create something new the long chain of causes behind it supports it. If you adopt the evolutionary perspective, your every move is united to the most distant past.

Now I’m getting closer to what I really wanted to express. Not a theory but a melancholic reflection.

On March 1st 1580, Montaigne completed his ‘Note to the Reader’ for his long and voluminous essays. He set his pen (or feather) down and submitted himself to the currents of history. On May 11th 2007 I opened his essays and began reading in English his ‘Au Lecteur’ translated from the French. Something about that date shook me. 1580. Long time ago. A long time ago this man set to write down his ideas and experiences in countless pages. Four hundred twenty-seven years later I pick up his book and read in the thick darkness of midnight till my eyes dropped with exhaustion. Today I woke up with an idea on the tip of my tongue. Trying to shape it and give it a name. Montaigne, a man dead for four hundred fifteen years, influenced my Monday and if you are reading this, he managed to sneak into your life too; changing the course of your life ever so slightly, making you sit before your computer ten minutes extra than you had planned for.

If you adopt the evolutionary perspective, your every move is united to the most distant past.

Montaigne is an example of a life that has been recorded and has been able to influence people in the future. But the number of people that achieve this is negligible when compared to all those that leave no trace and return silently to the dark abyss from where they came. We like to think that life is Great. That it is worth living and that so much of it is special and worthy of commenting. That is why we meet up with our friends and tell them what we did, how we feel, what we hope for. It is sad and discouraging to think that our most troublesome struggles and our most dazzling joys will be lost completely and in five hundred years they will be of no use to anyone.

We are an island of consciousness engulfed in the ambiguous ocean of time.

I find something else discouraging. Of those millions and millions of lives, the lives of the masses that died in plagues, wars, and famines and remain in the history books only as a number:

8,000,000 dead in the Thirty Years War

75,000,000 dead after the Black Plague

100,000,000 dead during the Atlantic Slave Trade

and so on…

What about their Interpretation of Life. They had an equally valid opportunity of experiencing life, perhaps in the most atrocious circumstances. Their thoughts and yearnings are now lost under the memory of a number.

I’d like to compare all those opinions. The lush forest of conceptions that each skull harbors. There are as many as beetles in the world.

Is there a God?

Is there a soul?

Is there an afterlife?

Is there a purpose in life?

What is matter?

What are the stars?

What is happiness?

Every one has something to say. Every one has a right to that opinion. And every opinion is part of the legacy they inherited. The evolution of all forms and shapes; from the hair in your head to your thinking in verbs, nouns and adjectives. We are bound to the most distant past, perhaps too to the more distant future.

Whatever you do today, think what role it will play in the great course of things. When you pay for a pack of cigarettes, think of the journey the coin is about to embark upon. Perhaps a thousand years from now, that same coin is going to be dug up by a future archeologist and speculate about life at the beginning of the 21st century. Gaze up to the sky and imagine all those that have done the same, some seeing the wonderful creation of God, others the grand excitement of space, and others still, the unbelievable profundity of the human mind. Kiss your lover and wonder when the first human kiss was invented. Eat an apple and speculate from what distant tree it came from. Spit out its seeds and consider that in fifty years a child might be swinging from its tree branches.

Now go, and explore. Be part of the unrecorded history that unwinds daily…