self portrait IV

So many selves (so many fiends and gods
each greedier than every) is a man
(so easily one in another hides;
yet man can, being all, escape none)

So huge a tumult is the simplest wish:
so pitiless a massacre the hope
most innocent (so deep's the mind of flesh
and so awake what waking calls sleep)

So never is most lonely man alone
(his briefest breathing lives some planet's year,
his longest life's a heartbeat of some sun;
his least unmotion roams the youngest star)

--how should a fool that calls him "I" presume
to comprehend not numerable whom?

(ee cummings)

rumi

Imagining is like feeling around in a dark lane,
or washing your eyes with blood.

K

The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master's whiplash.

Artaud

Once launched upon the fury of his task, an actor requires infinitely more power to keep from committing a crime than a murderer needs courage to complete his act, and it is here, in its very gratuitousness, that the action and effect of a feeling in the theater appears infinitely more valid than that of a feeling fulfilled in life.

חוק אחד מחוקק לנצח על מצחי
חובת כל יחיד הנכנס לסביבתי
אסור להצטער
כך רשום ולא יותר
בעולם ששכח מה זה להיות זכאי

birah doleqet

How, from a fire
that never sinks
or sets,
would you escape?
(heraclitus)

"There are those to whom one must advise madness." - J.Joubert



"Not all who would go mad do." - J.Lacan

michaux

Could not life continue on earth without wind? Or must everything
tremble, always, always?



No, no, not gain. Travel to lose. That's what you need.



To understand, the intelligence must get itself dirty. Above all,
before it even gets dirty, it has to get hurt.

Eye’s roundness between the bars.

bernardo soares

Tedium is not the disease of being bored because there’s nothing to do, but the more serious disease of feeling that there’s nothing worth doing.

Certain sensations are slumbers that fill up our mind like a fog and prevent us from thinking, from acting, from clearly and simply being. As if we hadn’t slept, something of our undreamed dreams lingers in us, and the torpor of the new day’s sun warms the stagnant surface of our senses. We’re drunk on not being anything, and our will is a bucket poured out onto the yard by the listless movement of a passing foot.

Everything is emptiness, even the idea of emptiness. Everything is said in a language that is incomprehensible to us, a stream of syllables that do not re-echo in our understanding. Life is empty, the soul is empty, the world is empty. All the gods die a death that is greater than death itself. Everything is emptier than emptiness. Everything is a chaos of the nothing.

When I think like that, and look around me in the hope that reality must surely quench my thirst, I see expressionless gestures. Stones, bodies, thoughts – everything is dead. All movement has come to a standstill, and everything stands still in the same way. Nothing says anything to me. Nothing is known, though not because I find it strange but because I do not know what it is. The world has been lost. And in the depths of my soul – which is the only thing that is real at this moment – there is a sharp, invisible, pain, a sadness that resembles the sound it makes, like tears in a dark room.

dream

standing with a psychologist and introducing her to a friend who is a mute, can only make sounds that are unintelligible (generally he seems slightly deranged and/or autistic but a good friend) eventually after a whole conversation about him she hands me a paper which to my sinking horror reveals that my friend does not exist, that I had imagined him the whole time - it gets worse: the friend who doesn't exist is not the dumb mute I was telling her about but the one who I thought I had been this whole time! suddenly I realize that I am really the dumb mute and the other me vanishes, I am left struggling to speak but only able to force out a few incomprehensible sounds as though my mouth were sown shut or I had no mouth...

Conversation with a Foreigner

- What do you studying?
- Philosophy.
- What’s that?
- Philosophy? Oh. Um... well, it’s...the history of ideas, the way people think...
- So you know what I thinking now?
- No, not exactly that... it’s like... how people have thought about things: why are we here, what’s our purpose, do we have a purpose, what is reality, what can we know, questions like that.
- Oh. Like where we come from.
- Yeah, kind of...
- So, you will work in hospital?
- What? No... um, I guess I could write books...
- Like the ones you reading?
- (laughing) Yeah, exactly like those ones.
- (smiling though unconvinced) That's good.

of mallarme

"Unfortunately I arrived at this point through a horrible sensitivity, and it is time that I wrap it in an external indifference, which will replace my lost strength..."

Sensitivity continually endangered - nerves registering the subtlest of vibrations , every jolt of injustice, each pang of pain, swathed in robes of indifference to blunt the blade of existence

The Protozoan (e.g. amoeba) constantly remakes its boundaries as its pseudopodia surround and incorporate food. The protozoan form of consumption is an eternal process of recreating its own borders in such a way that its desired object gets included within itself. It simply redraws the edges of itself around the reality it wants to assimilate. Almost like a child's crayon gone astray.

When prayers become
Mute blades
That sing against stone
Fatal forgeries of a throat
Engulfed by hands
The thousand knives of breathing….

Chart the breathless
Rhythm of the body in anguish
Nerves shuddering in the windless void.
Indifference grating and
Dis inte grating.
Music organized in no agreement,
Music of taste and touch,
Tactile intensities,
Language rubbing up against the body’s
Estranged tongue

Rusted moans
Of soul-twisted metal,
Heated contortions that birth
New deformities:
Tumorous multiplication.
...

mandelstam

My pen has become insubordinate: it has splintered and squirted its black blood out in all directions

I am not afraid of incoherence or gaps.
I shear the paper with long scissors.
I paste on ribbons as a fringe.
A manuscript is always a storm, worn to rags, torn by beaks.
It is the first draft of a sonata.
Scribbling is better than writing.
I do not fear seams or the yellowness of the glue.
I am a tailor, I am an idler.
I draw Marat in his stockings.
I draw martins.

It is terrifying to think that our life is a tale without a plot or hero, made up out of desolation and glass, out of the feverish babble of constant digressions...
Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream.
Sometimes a lowered lid sees more than an eye, and the tiers of wrinkles on a human face peer like a gathering of old blind men.

O to bring back the bashfulness of seeing fingers
They who are going to die can love and see
Sound can be pouring through their fingers

ex nihilo

Creating something out of nothing is easy.
Creating nothing out of nothing - now that's poetry.

parallels II

To Nobodaddy
Why art thou silent & invisible
Father of jealousy
Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds
From every searching Eye

Why darkness & obscurity
In all thy words & laws
That none dare eat the fruit but from
The wily serpents jaws
Or is it because Secresy
gains females loud applause
(blake)


psalm
Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm,
niemand bespricht unsern Staub.
Niemand.

Gelobt seist du, Niemand.
Dir zulieb wollen
wir blühn.
Dir
entgegen.

Ein Nichts
waren wir, sind wir, werden
wir bleiben, blühend:
die Nichts-, die
Niemandsrose.

Mit
dem Griffel seelenhell,
dem Staubfaden himmelswüst,
der Krone rot
vom Purpurwort, das wir sangen
über, o über
dem Dorn.
(celan)


Ciudad Sin Sueño
No duerme nadie por el cielo. Nadie, nadie.
No duerme nadie.
Pero si alguien cierra los ojos,
¡azotadlo, hijos míos, azotadlo!

Haya un panorama de ojos abiertos
y amargas llagas encendidas.
(lorca)

kleist

It was then a confusion. Kiss and bite
Resemble one another, and the one
Who deeply loves can well confuse the two.

Is Humpty Dumpty's corpse the inevitable consequence of Nimrod's ziggurat (and all because some medieval nominalist forgot to shave)?

Roethke

The wall has entered: I must love the wall,
A madman staring at perpetual night,
A spirit raging at the visible.
I breathe alone until my dark is bright.
Dawn's where the white is. Who would know the dawn
When there's a dazzling dark behind the sun?

Once I delighted in a single tree;
The loose air sent me running like a child -
I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after-image of the inner eye.
Flesh cries to flesh; and bone cries to bone;
I die into this life, alone yet not alone.

Was it a god his suffering renewed? -
I saw my father shrinking in his skin;
He turned his face: there was another man,
Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid.
He quivered like a bird in birdless air,
Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere.

Fish feed on fish, according to their need:
My enemies renew me, and my blood
Beats slower in my careless solitude.
I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed.
I think a bird, and it begins to fly.
By dying daily, I have come to be.

kafka's walking stick

Auf Balzacs Spazierstockgriff: Ich breche alle Hindernisse.
Auf meinem: Mich brechen alle Hindernisse.
Gemeinsam ist das "alle"

Celan:
Reality is not. It must be sought and won.

Valery:
Finding is nothing. The difficulty is in acquiring what has been found.

One must go into himself armed to the teeth.

I sacrifice myself inwardly to what I would be!

Gaps are my starting point. My impotence is my origin.

I am the unstable.

Kafka:
My life is a hesitation before birth.

Pessoa:
We're dead when we think we're living; we start living when we die.

Jabes:
Your hangmen have your voice and your hands...

Man is a merchant of ashes.

The patience of the scream has no limits. It outlasts martyrdom.

Cioran:
When we are a thousand miles away from poetry, we still participate in it by that sudden need to scream.

An existence which does not hide a great madness has no value.

Michaux:
He who hides his madman dies voiceless.

He who sought to escape the World becomes its traslator, too.

Borges:
Praised be the nightmare, which reveals to us that we have the power to create Hell.

Self Portrait 3

He could have resigned himself to a prison. To end as a prisoner - that could be a life's ambition. But it was a barred cage that he was in. Calmly and insolently, as if at home, the din of the world streamed out and in through the bars, the prisoner was really free, he could take part in everything, nothing that went on outside escaped him, he could simply have left the cage, the bars were yards apart, he was not even a prisoner.

*

He has the feeling that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way. From this sense of hindrance, again, he deduces the proof that he is alive.

*

The bony structure of his own forehead blocks his way; he batters himself bloody against his own forehead.

*

He feels imprisoned on this earth, he feels constricted; the melancholy, the impotence, the sicknesses, the feverish fancies of the captive afflict him; no comfort can comfort him, since it is merely comfort, gentle head-splitting comfort glozing the brutal fact of imprisonment. But if he is asked what he actually wants he cannot reply, for - that is one of his strongest - he has no conception of freedom.

(a page out of Kafka's "He", Notes From the Year 1920)

Disappearance

The worn out suit
I call myself
Coming apart at the seams
Too tight this
Skin that threatens
Suffocation as possibility
Pushes against
A carefully woven face
Thread by thread
Un-
Ravel
ing
Until I lay in coils about my feet
Naked breath
Staining the air

time bandits

Evil: God isn't interested in technology. He cares nothing for the microchip or the silicon revolution. Look how he spends his time, forty-three species of parrots! Nipples for men!
Robert: Slugs.
Evil: Slugs! HE created slugs! They can't hear. They can't speak. They can't operate machinery. Are we not in the hands of a lunatic?

"To deprecate your own kind, to vilify and pulverize them, to attack their foundations, to undermine your very basis, to destroy your point of departure, to punish your origins… Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do, one so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it."

omen

The sunrise cuts a sharp red through the cold air. I look up from my desk. Outside my window a massive bird of prey is perched. A red-tailed hawk, hunched over a freshly killed pigeon. The head of the pigeon is gone and strips of red flesh are being torn out of its body by the powerful beak. I walk to the window. When it is done eating the hawk hops onto the railing and surveys upper manhattan from the sixth floor. Sensing my presence behind the window, it turns around and we gaze at one another for a time. The stillness stirs. It says something in a language I do not understand. After another glance around, it is gone. All that is left: the half-devoured carcass of a pigeon and the epic absence of a predator.

the sun burns
i shed my skin
the air tries to suffocate
i punctured my body with holes
the ocean moved to drown
i become a wave amongst waves
the wind seeks my last breath
it was broken by my throat
the moon's seductive glance
is met by my indifference
time's pacing stumbled
at the rhythm of my dance

I became extinct.

cornered by death
my fangs gleam -
a grimace or a laugh?
the cemetery of hope

I become extinction.

for Liege's graduation

Where are your limits?
The cold metal bars of finitude
Press reassuringly against your palms.
But a desert cannot be caged.
The wild heat behind your eyes
Remains untamed.
Not until you accept the abyss
That hides under your name.
Not until you have disrobed yourself
Of yourself, can you truly
Begin to be born.
And we will watch
Breathless at the worlds you unfold

self portrait II: becoming

Pessoa - Disquiet #262

Today I was struck by an absurd but valid sensation. I realized, in an inner flash, that I’m no one. Absolutely no one. In that flash, what I’d supposed was a city proved to be a barren plain, and the sinister light that showed me myself revealed no sky above. Before the world existed, I was deprived of the power to be. If I was reincarnated, it was without myself, without my I.

I’m the suburbs of a non-existent town, the long-winded commentary on a book never written. I’m no one, no one at all. I don’t know how to feel, how to think, how to want. I’m the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn’t know how to complete me.

I always think, I always feel, but there’s no logic in my thought, no emotions in my emotion. I’m falling from the trapdoor on high through all of infinite space in an aimless, infinitudinous, empty descent. My soul is a black whirlpool, a vast vertigo circling a void, the racing of an infinite ocean around a hole in nothing. And in these waters which are more a churning than actual waters float the images of all I’ve seen and heard in the world –houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and syllables of voices all moving in a sinister and bottomless swirl.

And amid all this confusion I, what’s truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I’m the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what’s truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls’ viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it.

It’s not demons (who at least have a human face) but hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it’s the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

w.s.

Speech is not dirty silence clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.

Zerissenheit

Hopelessness is the most solemn and supreme moment in life. Till that point we have been assisted - now we are left to ourselves. Previously we had to do with men and human laws - now with eternity and with the complete absence of laws...


--there's a cruelty to his irony, a ruthlessness to his self-cannibalism. entrenchement, a machine of decomposition (de-composer: think musically, a symphony of decay), where to bleed is to know, to bruise is to understand... the fatality of all crucial experiences... where hands replace eyes as organs of perception, enatiling proximity contact contamination vulnerability (whereas vision is based on distance, safety, distinction) ... where futility is not the frustration of one's hopes but a prized vantage point for the athletic leap of consciousness into its own complexity, consciuosness taken to its own end... where pain solitude terror death all become possibilities, doors, chances that must be mined, where no salvation is allowed, no prinicple or standpoint that does not immediately consume itself, his is a nihilism that blazes against the night sky, he makes the nothing move... "and all is possible because nothing is relevant"

parallels

"How do we know if a book is holy? If it defiles the hands." The sacrality of texts, which determines their canonical status in the Talmud, is gauged by the extent to which they violate the one who comes into contact with them. A book is sacred only if it defiles you. Seek out those books that leave you ravaged. (Scribbler)


I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy? Good lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief. (Kafka)

Stared into the sunken
deathless eyes of God:
two wells of impenetrable
black, a blackness
without reflection

Felt the stink of the void
on God's wheezing breath
before erupting into laughter -
And my scream is still gnawing
at the foundations of the world

Rumi

Do you think I know what I'm doing?
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it's writing
or the ball can guess where it's going next.
*
Be melting snow, wash yourself of yourself
Become Oceanic
*
The mother and father are your attachment
to beliefs and bloodties
and desires and comforting habits
Don't listen to them!
They seem to protect,
but they imprison.
They are your worst enemies.
They make you afraid of living in emptiness.
*
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
First, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing being.
*
Your name has been erased
*
Darkness is your candle

Marguerite Duras:
To write is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.

becoming snake

History written by the victims. Vocabulary of the vanquished. Otherwise why record? Only the exhausted remember. Victims of the human. Trampled underfoot by their own humanity. The defiant are always condemned to villainy.

The real hero of Genesis? The snake. Nachash. A word which is etymologically tied to necromancy and sorcery. A snake but also to guess or to divine.

From the snake we first learnt to challenge divinity. From the snake we first learnt of the constraints of eternity. From the snake we first tasted mortality – that blind spot which all gods conceal. From the snake we first learnt how to break open the gates of heaven even if only to be expelled from paradise.

A forked tongue, aware of its own duplicity, mimicking the divine ability to bluff, the deception of language, the blasphemy of fiction. Demanding of mortality that it look itself in the mirror. To stare into the deathless eyes of God and see the decaying reflection. The Nachash sees death as possibility and transience as superior to permanence.

To reject the promises of gods and men, the commands that condemn us to salvation.

To shed ones’ skin. To flay one’s convictions. To surrender the toughened armor of dead skin. To give birth to oneself. To enter the world again with utter vulnerability. To find the boundaries that have deadened into protective layers. The edge of the self. One’s threshold to the world. The limit that demarcates interior from exterior. And to sacrifice this border. To become penetrable and porous. To become snake-like. To shed one’s skin. To stand naked. And then to shed one’s nakedness. And all that is underneath it. To become a surface, a soundwave, a rhythm


It is told that the Red Sea did not split until one man braved the waves. Nachshon, literally ‘one of snake-like [qualities]’, waded in until the water reached his nostrils. Ignoring all prophecies, Nachshon enters the sea. Abandoning his life to the water, he submerges his body, consigning his last breath to the waves. Calling god’s bluff, to go all in, to risk everything, even death… when god’s last card becomes valueless, when existence itself is wagered against omnipotent absence, when a man stands out of the crowd and forces god’s hand, going beyond the human, becoming the very waves, that is when mortality triumphs over the immortal and the tides of transcendence are overturned.

The mystic’s midnight lamp
The stone steps of broken temples
The clock’s timely fictions
The student’s frustrated pen
The father’s footprints on a child’s grave
The sleepless eyes dilating in the dark
The dew that drowns the insect
The shivering skin of love
The arrows that end in death
The solitude of defecation
The sand that buries the carcass
The suicide’s meticulous handwriting
The ashes of burnt dreams
The shadows over the unfought battlefield
The sea’s stammered prophecy
The intimate gaze between hunter and hunted

timelessness

Creaking and groaning the body
Of this makeshift vessel voices
Discontent over waves
Time's terrible monotony

Flapping and billowing the past
Sails puff themselves
Out of proportion, resisting
The anarchy of waves

Invisible and whining the future
Wind whispers
Its anxious song, breath
Of the unknown impregnating
Stammering sails

Is there
Is there a man
Is there a man I ask you
Who would tear his past apart
shred his sails
ignore the wind
abandon ship
To the timeless waves
Who would dare such destruction
Past nor future
The madness of waves

No, not a man
Not a man.

vulnerability

Write. So it hurts less. Write so as not to live. Write so as to die. a suicidal writing... Become child again. Let fortresses fall. Swallow the flames. Burn harsher than the pain. Shame it into ashes.

wandering the earth each a quivering site of unspoken fear potentially disintegrative the brink of implosion Pain – the universal currency of this species a dormant volcanic landscape steaming breath of disaster Who dares to feel without being crushed God could not hold such pain without fracturing creation the ear-splitting scream of a deity broken in pieces convulsions of possibility

Byron

Though my many faults defaced me,
Could no other arm be found,
Than the one which once embraced me,
To inflict a cureless wound ?

All my faults perchance thou knowest,
All my madness none can know;
All my hopes, where'er thou goest,
Wither, yet with thee they go.

Every feeling hath been shaken;
Pride, which not a world could bow,
Bows to thee--by thee forsaken,
Even my soul forsakes me now:

But 't is done --- all words are idle ---
Words from me are vainer still;
But the thoughts we cannot bridle
Force their way without the will.

The Healer

For Dr. J

As sighing salmon
Shoulder the world's sorrow
The weight of pain
Penetrates his marrow

Unable to turn his gaze
From the suffering shores
The ocean infinite feels
The slap of his oars

If he holds enough pieces
Of hearts that have splintered
Perhaps he can relieve
A world become cinders

He bears with the patience
Of those intimate with death
The cosmic wound of God
Marks his every breath

In his eyes a sea
Of tears is remembered
As they scan the pages
Of life’s little errors

The only way to know
Is to fail he always said
In the faces of the fallen
A bible can be read

chips of iceland

walked on a melting glacier. what a metaphor

this place is like Lord of the Rings on acid...

Heavy mist. Low visibility. A lagoon filled with icebergs. Natural, translucent ice sculptures. Cumbersome white fragments. Floating in the mist. Birds circle madly. They dive for fish. I reach the pebbled shore. A fish comes up to the surface. On its side it turns. Flopping on the shallow. It looks at me. Its silvery back flashes in the cold gleam of the frozen landscape. It wriggles off and swims away. I walk along the shore into the fog.

Stop in a small fishing town. Actually considered quite large for these parts. Population 300. The restaurant served a buffet –10 types of freshly caught fish. All the guesthouses were full. Driving in the not so dark night. Meet a farmer whose wife is an artist. They have rooms to let. Her art is on the walls. She oscillates between abstract and expressionism. The water still smells like sulfur here.

Bog of eternal stench: sulfur craters. Yellow, ochre, pink sides. Milky light blue water, steaming. Or steel-grey liquid bubbling and frothing. An awesome sight. But the stench is overpowering. So awful, my head reels from it.

Mordor: Charcoal black with patches of light blue as far as the eye can see. Smoke rises from various parts of this burnt scenery made of broken rocks and craters thrust skywards. A shattered, smoldering, ashy landscape. The blackness. Everywhere. Steaming. It fumes across the vastness. Like the aftermath of some colossal fire. A battle between gods. The brokenness – cracks, fissures, rubble. One can smell destruction here. Frozen lava flows, petrified in movement, blacker than the rest reach down the valley, grasping at the green. The glaciers glint in the distance.

Through the mountains once more. Half an hour on a dirt road. The canyon. No railings or protection. No tourism industry framing the ferocity. No niagra-like kodak moments. To stand a foot away from the edge. Walls of water, gales rising upwards. A hundred detonations every second. hypnotizing. I think of Kundera's remarks on vertigo: not the fear of falling but the fear of the desire to fall. Dettifoss. The name of Europe's largest waterfall. (I imagine it means 'God's Madness'). I am silenced. The pain of no words.

jrkglæjskfhrtsubrr

I have reached a land where the sand is black, and the waves tell
their tale darkly amongst the craggy cliffsides. A land being
literally torn apart by its own volcanic activity but which still
holds stretches of endless green. This is an enchanted island. Near
the town i am staying in there are 5 rocky spikes reaching up out
of the water. Legend has it that two gnomes were dragging a
three-masted ship in to land but were caught off guard by the
sunset and froze into solid rock. Today I head further east to the
glacier fields. I seek to discover the secret of frozen landscapes, perhaps it will help me better navigate my own...

dream 5

I was to accomplish a task for the great grandfatherly wizard named Gandalf. I stole a special sword or something... but I did not succeed and I finally approached Gandalf with bowed head, full of shame saying 'I have failed you' and I knelt and heald the sword out to him. My failure overwhlemed me. But instead of his usual harsh voice he answered softly, 'if you had failed you would not be here offering me your failure' and he pointed to the sword 'look, it has turned to pure copper has it not...' I looked at it and realized that it was true and set about chopping the log that couldn't be chopped... ??

self portrait

The Renegade - by E.M. Cioran

He remembers being born somewhere, having believed in native errors, having proposed principles and preached inflammatory stupidities. He blushes for it... and strives to abjure his past, his real or imaginary fatherlands, the truths generated in his very marrow. He will find peace only after having annihilated in himself the last reflex of the citizen, the last inherited enthusiasm. How could the heart's habits still chain him, when he seeks liberation from genealogies and when even the ideal of the ancient sage, scorner of all cities, seems to him a compromise? The man who can no longer take sides because all men are necessarily right and wrong, because everything is at once justified and irrational - that man must renounce his own name, tread his identity underfoot, and begin a new life in impassibility or despair. Or otherwise, invent another genre of solitude, expatriate himself in the void, and pursue - by means of one exile or another - the stages of uprootedness. Released from all prejudices, he becomes the unusable man par excellence, to whom no one turns and whom no one fears because he admits and repudiates everything with the same detachment...
(he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live, he demolishes the signposts on all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time...)

why write

I write in order to beat back the walls of my apartment
I write in order to silence the mocking laughter of my library
I write in order to tame the wild darkness of sleepless eyes
I write in order to murder the white madness of the empty page
I write in order to exhaust my insomnia

archetypal dream 2

I am with my friend Jason. We meet some girl and start talking to her. She says, challengingly, “I know who you are.” Since I have never met her I respond, “yeah, who am I?” She looks at me and says, “you’re Naftali Casanova.” I’m stunned. How does she know my name and my capoeira nickname? Who is this girl? “Yes,” she continues, “we learnt together, you taught me the bible.” I am straining to remember, something rings a bell. I do the calculation and figure it must have been 11 years ago that I knew her. But why don’t I remember? We’re in a bookstore and she shows me the bible that I learnt with her. It’s vaguely familiar. Reaching, can’t grasp the memory. I open it, it has underlines and my young handwriting. This did belong to me. The cashier of the bookstore (which appears to be the check out register of a supermarket I frequent) says the bible costs 4 hundred and some odd dollars. I pull out the receipt for it from ten years ago and show him “look, I already paid for it, I have the receipt. It’s mine. Why are you charging me?” He’s not responding, he keeps repeating and typing at his calculator, “Sorry, that’ll be 486 plus tax.” “But it’s my book, look, here’s the receipt.” “Well, we can give you a discount, it comes to… 30 dollars then.” I pull out my wallet just to get my book back, but then “so I’m paying 30 dollars for a book I’ve already bought?” I don’t pay. Anyway, I leave with the book, and am still trying really hard to remember what my connection with this girl is. There were some candies between the pages that I do remember, but who is she, and why is this event so foggy? I go to my father and ask him about it. He becomes very standoffish, looking away. He’s not telling me something. I keep pressing him. The details don’t add up. My brother is there; he also knows something. But no one is talking, as if from guilt. “How does she know my nickname Casanova if she claims to have known me ten years ago, but I just got that name last year?” Reluctantly, he lets out a few hints. There was some kind of experiment that he preformed on me when I was little, that my mother disapproved of, she was worried. He gave me a bible to read instead of my candies between the pages he put crackers – I started to remember, I had eaten them and didn’t like the taste, they were very strong – these crackers apparently were filled with crack or some other drug. It’s vaguely coming back to me. “Yes you didn’t like them,” he says. “Why did they make me scared?” (I was thinking of other more recent drug experiences I’ve had). “No, you just didn’t like how they made you feel.” I seem to remember my mother standing up on a hilltop and my father and us kids running down the hill. She is worried for me and the effect of the crackers that my dad slipped in to the bible. I still have trouble remembering exactly what happened. I keep pressing my father, trying to get him to tell me what he did, and how this girl knows me. Why can’t I remember?

dream

The family or some other social group is sitting around in a cricle, i am vomiting and shitting excrement. I'm trying to cover it up, clean myself up, but no one is helping me (maybe they're blocking access to the toilet, or not telling me where it is, ignoring me...don't remember) i start yelling at them. My hands and mouth are full of shit and I'm yelling at an indifferent crowd "why aren't you helping me?"

letter

this life seems a numbing dream I try to sustain, inevitably i see through the planks of this makeshift bridge glimpsing the infite chasm beneath me. Abysses open up under my feet at the slightest provocation. I am like the candle- panicked by the smallest breath. My eyes are prisons, my tears inmates of indifference. My words bleed where i cannot. They carry the feint odour of a despair that is locked inside a labyrinth of roomless doors. I take refuge in my words, the words my pen weeps. As long as I am speaking, as long as I am writing, my pain is less keen. There are those whose pain leaves them abandoned in the frozen landscapes of the desert. How can we care for the world (that abominable abstraction) or for others when we are hounded by our own existence? Insomnia, someone once wrote, stems from a lack of faith. To sleep requires one to trust the night. Those who see the world with eyes that have plunged into hell cannot close them to the night. We know the dark too intimately to turn our backs to it.

celan

Instrange yourself / deeper


Trust the tearstain

thinking about those who have walled themselves up in apathy in order to simulate the illusion of invulnerability. These people treat others like islands, weigh stations, temporary sites of rest or exoticism, stopovers between the solipsism of the high seas. They may even visit an island several times, but when the winds change their course, they move on to other waters...

“prayer-sharp knives”

To puncture the omnipotent silence
To wound the divine indifference
To make God bleed
So that something
Any thing
Will ooze into this void
And violate the emptiness

sickness

Sick of profundity
Sick of ecstasy
Sick of poets in-
dulging in fantasy

Sick of confession
Sick of song
Sick of writers ad-
mitting they’re wrong

Sick of transparency
And dissemblance too
Sick of pronouns
Of ‘I’ and ‘you’

Sick of words
Silence is no better
Sick of their hold on
existence enfettered

Sick of insanity
And the myth of health
Of having to live
By means of stealth

Sick of all who rhyme
As if words could help
Sick of nausea
Of sickness itself

Satan

My chametz is me and I am it. My chametz is where I like to be and it looks like all my dreams...

puerto rico

anxiety. loss of familiar horizons. precarious ground of routine I constructed opening up to reveal the abyss underneath me. fear subsides like the tide going out. allowing for the unfamiliar. trying to scope out babes on the beach, while the madman next to me is deciding the fate of existence.

rejecting redemption

Abandoning one temple and erecting another. These new gods also must be betrayed. We must murder our self-created gods as well - the form of highest respect. The only valid temples are the ones that have blasphemy carved into every stone with which they are built. No, I know no allegiances. What's that you say? That I'm fooling myself? That I'm inevitably entangled in webs of affiliation to which I pay homage? Perhaps. Even so, it's a lie worth believing in. What's that? Will I be grovelling again at the steps of this temple tomorrow? Most probably. But at least today, now, I have demolished it to rubble. For one moment I have tasted divinity - that frightful fiction. If only I could believe my words. To make the stone bloom, as Celan would say. Moses' heroism was in striking the rock instead of speaking to it, as God had commanded. For this, he forfeited the promised land. He refused to pray to stone. His prayer came in the form of a fist.

"You still think you are a truth-teller
You still think your name means something
You still think the wounds on your body are bleeding
For one night, try to forget..."
-Jason

midrash

And he arose that night and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed over the ford of Jabbok. He took them, sent them over the brook, and sent over what he had. Then Jakkob was left alone; and a Man wrestled with him until the breaking of day. Now when he saw that he did not prevail against him, he touched the socket of his hip; and the socket of Jakkob's hip was out of joint as He wrestled with him. And He said, "Let me go, for the day breaks."
But he said, "I will not let you go unless You bless me!"


And Jakkob sent his family and companions over the ford of Jabbok.
Then he was left alone to do battle with his God. And he wrestled with him through the night. When he saw that he could not overcome him, he touched the socket of his hip and wounded the divinity who then released him from his grip and walked away, forever after limping…

But when dawn finally broke he would not release the struggling god who had wounded him. No, he clung to him with all his might, this divine suffering, until one could not tell where the wounded man ended and suffering divinity began…

And when dawn finally broke, Jakkob walked away limping. But Jakkob did not continue across the ford of Jabbok. He returned every night to that same spot where he had been wounded, and waited for the man to return…

Jakkob, alone at last with his demons, grapples with himself in the deafening darkness. Finally, as the shadows begin to recede, he strikes out selfwards, inflicting a mortal wound on his past…

"Only he who has 'died' of being merely a man, will ever be other than a man"
-George Bataille

"We donot understand ruins, until we ourselves have become ruins."
-Heinrich Heine

'I don't believe in God, the bastard!'
- Samuel Beckett

was ist das- die Glucklichkeit?

Benjamin once wrote that happiness is the ability to look inside yourself without being terrified. And this got me thinking that we shouldn't be asking "are you happy?" but rather "what would happiness look like to you at this given moment?" Now - the ability to inhabit the present without the anxiety of trying to be elsewhere or elsewhen.

Lenz

The rushing of the wind was like a chorus of Titans; he felt as if he could thrust a gigantic fist into heaven and seize God by the scruff of the neck and drag Him bodily through the clouds, as if he could crunch the world to bits with his teeth and spit the pieces in their Creator's face; he cursed, he blasphemed.
-- Georg Buchner

dream

the family (sans papa) is on a ship, heading to some vacation/adventure. I somehow discover that the captain is actually a pirate and means to do them harm. So I go about confronting him in private, with a sword, thinking i had him. But he - it turns out - is an expert swordsman, and with a few deft moves makes it clear to me how powerless i am against him. Then he leaves me and returns to where the family is. I have to find some way of getting off the ship, because I know what is going to happen and i don't want to be there, powerless, when it does. How to get off without letting them know something is wrong? And can I get off, we're in the middle of the ocean? Where is the next port?

life imitating art?

I wanted to drive off into the sunset. But I realized that if I'm there, in the car, driving, I wont see myself disappearing into the sun, I'll just be driving, and then it'll get dark, and I'll still be driving...

To K

Do you see the pain
written across my face
written in your hand
with mortal ink
you have gashed your name
across my face

I am nothing
more
than an open wound
like a gaping door
flung wide
rebelling against its hinges

gasping for the relief
of your hand
to quiet the tyrranical tempests
of longing
writhing within
renting me asunder

Through your absence
I have become
a god
suffering the unbearable
eternity of the present

ambien rant

enough abstraction, enough hiding behind the vagaries of vocabulary - damn, i'm doing it again, even in the act of resignation my words, my precious weapons that i use to battle my way out of the grasping specters of loneliness come back and haunt, hovering over my fingers... can i ever escape these spiralings, is there even something to escape to, a more primordial core authenticity or are we just smoke and mirrors, running from surface to surface, missing that nonexistent depth that seems to hold the secret to something... i don't even know what. it's easy to move forard, propelled by inertia, Newton's first law or third, i can't remnember, much harder to stop, look back. like a man running down a hill schopenhauer once said, but then why am i quoting some dead german guy... the point it running downhill, you build momentum and it's eassiest just to keep in check with that, because if you stop, you'll fall (i did when i was seven, running down the steep incline that leads to the park in front of riverside drive...) fell on my forehead with a smack. Memories, i spoke to K of my earliest memories at this very table. She really enjoyed analysing them, vivid they were. But she is gone and i must learn to forget. it is so hard, but to unlearn is far more important than learning at this point. but i was saying that the sense of progress you get from flying forward is deceptive, it's not real movement, it's the inability to stand still, to turn around and stop the flow of time in its tracks, i've been reading benjamin and he's on to something here. i feel like i'm writing inbtimately with you guys, one of the greatest anxieties i have as a writer is the reader, but this sharing feels safe in a way... yes, i'm probably affected by the sleeping pills and stuff, but maybe this is the only way to get beyond the pretention to get beneath the assumed vocabulary that has taken root in my writing and speaking, and root it out... who can just stop flying with the flow, and accept the fall, the crash - scrape your knees hit your head, that all too familiar nauseous wave that engulfs you the minute after impact... what memories. but you see, maybe it is the memories that help in this halting, coming to a stop, not to live in fear, not to be propelled by the negative energy expended in order to keep the fear behind, but to allow it to catch up with myself and inhabit it, don't slay the dragon become the dragon

for those with myopic vision...

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one- another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

The Heretic

when the last threshold is breached,
when the depths of interiority become vaster than transcendent dialogue,
when the scream of wounded subjectivity drowns out the call of the other,
when pain becomes more omnipotent than God,
...the age of the Heretic has begun.

broken hearts, darkened days

MERLIN: Love is, after all, one of the strongest forces in the world.

YOUNG ARTHUR (incredulously): Even stronger than gravity?

MERLIN: Well... yes, I suppose it is.

And the Tree was happy...But not really!

Doesn't the added appendage to this concluding phrase sum up our childhood?

In the beginning was the wound. And the wound was with God. And the wound was God.

Pen to Paper

The surface is scarred
Dull black spatters

Staining the virginal
Emptiness of the page

Burning experience
Long extinguished
Now revived
With wounded whispers

The slow breath that entices the ember to glow


Words are the memory of experience
As ashes are the memory of fire

Knife to Skin

The barrier is breached
Searing red spreads

Intoxicated colour
Over penetrated skin

Waves of pain
Crash
Upon the shores of indifference
Shattering the icy trance of numbness

Eruptions of throbbing intensity
Drown out apathy’s ubiquitous despotism

Abolishing the limit
Wedding inside to out
Blasphemous communion

the king is dead, long live the king

dreamt Papa died. Was upset but not very emotional. Saw Y.Rand who i haven't encountered in over four years and though i didn't want to be a pity-case (my brother just said hi and walked away, no need to vomit his emotions into the lap of anyone who comes along) , couldn't help myself and blurted out immediately "my father just died" after which i burst into tears on his shoulder. He knows what it's like to lose a parent. I also remember talking to some girl who felt sorry for me and telling her that now i was a millionaire because of the life insurance policy. economy of relationships. how bizarro.

bulgakovian conditioning

The only way to revive a mortally wounded cat is with a swig of benzyne

frenzied philosophy

Not necessity but excess, not efficiency but messiness, not sufficiency but overflowing abundance. Much of civilization is built upon the structured attempt at turning away from the violence of this realization. The anxiety caused by the overwhelming freedom of its implications drives the need for necessity.

Dasein's nightmare

Ja, aus der Welt werden wir nicht fallen. Wir sind einmal darin.

dreams

I had a dream last night: I was revisiting a scene from my past (which didn't actually happen, but rather it was a dream I had years ago...), in which the familty et al was swimming in this pool that was beside a large river, kind of a wayside of sorts. My brother was already there, and my father and uncle and cousins... I was showing someone else this memory, like I had gone back in time. And I say to them, "oh, I'm about to arrive, I came late with my mother." Then we see my mother swim up the river with a five-year-old me, and get into the pool where the family is swimming and playing. The child-me looks extremely fragile, like those kids who have a slight autism, more vulnerable than the rest. His baby hair is very sparse in one place (as if he'd had brain-surgery??) I feel sorry for him, for his weakness, his difference, his fragility. And just then he looks at me, our eyes lock, and there's a flash of understanding in his eyes, as if he knows he is looking at himself. I feel exposed for a second, before he looks away and starts playing with my mother who is holding him.

underground men

I am not a fighter. What does one do with this wretched awareness? Having survived Zarathustra’s visions only to awaken to the cold realization that I cannot exist at the edge of such an echoing abyss, that at such heights of excess my lungs choke on the thin air of fear… The race I belong to knows the wail of mourning better than the cry of battle. Do I have the strength to envision on my own, to become a prophet without a God, to invent some alternative method of madness that will alleviate the burden of this existence?

escape artist

To evade the present at all costs
I tried to bury myself in the future, in the tombs of temporality
A refugee of time
An emigrant of the infinitely echoing solitude of the moment

wailing walls

How to get behind oneself? To reach back to the normative structures of value that govern our comportment to the world and determine our self-conception? Is it possible? Or perhaps there is no “behind”, no a priori (however relativized and contingently historical) of values into which we have been socialized or traumatized? Are the internalized paternal forces merely another myth, is the parable of patriarchy an illusion? But even accepting that, how does that help, naming it as an illusion does not dispel its power. How does one escape an illusion? Can dreamers commit suicide? Brecht believes that Kafka envisioned a nightmare from which he never awoke. Is this to be my fate as well? I see a prisoner in a sealed room walking from wall to wall and inscribing names on each of them, hoping that they will disappear. When he gets tired of a name he crosses it out and writes another. An attempt to crack open language and extract its emancipatory juices. In the end, he slumps in a corner and gazes absently at the word-stained walls.

becoming

When I came to, I was running.
But where was I running to?
Or was I running away?
All I knew was that if I stopped running I would die.
I stopped running.

conception

forcing its way through the birthing cannals of cyberogenous genitalia, the BLOG emerges triumphantly into existence. "aaarghbla!" it shouts and looks around for its first unwitting victim...