Poem

Bitterness is not your bliss,
But shallow hearted decadence –
My love, you’ve lost your mind:
My tears are not your kind.
Thus this foreign tree stands
Against the coldness of biting hands,
And thus I walk, soaked with sadness,
Through this hell – pure brutal madness,
Alone, alone, alone, with one:
The thought of your heart gone, now won
By other eyes.
I sigh goodbye.

Salvation

It never ceases to amaze me! The devil perhaps exists for no other reason than that it is inconceivable that man, in spite of his depravity, in spite his finitude, could so insanely botch the idea of salvation by himself. Even the nearness of a concentration camp can be blurred out by eyes that are so intent on looking to the distant; so it is with our miserable conceptions of salvation as they relate to the present. Man has forgotten how to breathe, and in its place is repression that gains magnitude at every moment the contrast between the here and the glorious future city of oxygen called Heaven is brought before his eyes in times when he needs it most -- that is, in the present. No, salvation is now, or God is a fiction or an imbecile! And if you think the latter, would it not be pragmatically safe to conclude that He doesn't exist? And when you conclude this, would you not be better off than the man who believes that salvation is limited exclusively to the post-mortem in actually finding a meaning for yourself, a truth whose image you are stamped on, that you can thus find at least a limited happiness?

Bad Humor

Through fear of ridicule, we conceal our imperfections with humor, and thus have the eternal curse of never being found out, never being corrected, never being perfect. A sense of humor thus makes everything funny, and in proportion to its continual attempt makes the self of the humorist that much more tragic.

Greatness

The crowd can measure greatness only in proportion to its capacity to comprehend the greatness emitted by the great individual; thus if one has unparalleled greatness, to the point of surpassing the crowd's comprehension, there is only the possibility for faith in his greatness, hence unverified greatness, hence -- not greatness at all; he no longer is great, but -- foreign. Thus is the formula on which greatness rests: esse est percipi. One can only rely on oneself, and unless you are a genius at denial, you will hate yourself if you hold greatness to be the idealic waters in which to swim; one cannot convince himself of his worth except through a little reinforcement at the hands of others. But the others have relation to even more others; the opinion of subset 1 necessarily differs in opinion with the innumerable other subsets. Therefore what truly is greatness in relation to the crowd? What is greatness at all? A will to power supported by imaginary stilts. If you love fickleness, it is best to trust the crowd; take your own side arbitrarily, and someone is bound to love you, no matter how miserable your talents are in relation to anyone else, and if you know the alchemic art of adding obstinance to your denial, you can easily brush off the opinions of those you differ with as "inferior", "unenlightened", or brutally "incorrect". Nevertheless it is even better to trust yourself, but without a care for your own excellence; this is the only hope for an individual who wishes for a still conscience. Indeed, it is the only hope for an individual who wishes to see anything at all beyond the nauseating walls of self.

Philosophy is Dead

Philosophy, correctly understood, has died; its spirit has been replaced with "philologia", or "philognosis" -- "love of learning" and "love of knowledge" respectively -- but has kept the skin of the old word, meaning, as is known, "love of wisdom". These things are generally power-based -- the individual wants to know as much, to learn as much, to compare himself with the man next to him; but not in every case. Nevertheless, wisdom has died in philosophy, just as the soul has died in psychology. It has died, and it continues to die new deaths the moments when it is presumed that it can be taught. We have abandoned our intellectual health, for we have abandoned the pure/practical-reason synthesis, and taken to absorbing ourselves almost completely in the former; and what is wisdom but the concrete application of principles that are relevant to living life? The individual who studies the philosophers is typically not doing it to learn how to adapt his soul to the rythym of the universe, but for various goals that fall short of the attempt: to impress his friends, to impress himself, to find a teaching position, to learn how to solve particular deep problems to learn how to forego them and thereby leave philosophy on the floor -- there is no innate love for wisdom; there is no existential growth; there is no suffering for its sake, there is no rejoicing over it and its fruits; in short, there is no -- dancing!

Thus no wonder it tends to repel everyone these days. A conglmoration of impenetrable jargon. Nothing practical.

Couplet

Love's hopelessly gone, gone, gone
When our claws reveal themselves.

Think!

"Man is hard to discover -- hardest of all for himself.... He, however, has discovered himself who says, "This is my good and evil"; with that he has reduced to silence the mole ad dwarf who say, "Good for all, evil for all."

"This is my way; where is yours?" -- thus I answered those who asked me "the way." For the way -- that does not exist." -- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

"The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die." -- Kierkegaard, Journals

The Death of the Poet

The poet will die,
I said to the sky,
Hot tears in my eyes.

Then where will I go,
And what shall I show,
With whom shall I sigh?

I looked to the road --
It's madness, I know --
While waving goodbye.

Existential Gambling

We think we are unique by virtue of the many concepts and their multifarious relation, but everything under the auspices of concepts is already ground that has been tilled before. True uniqueness lies beyond; it cannot be summarized in words or titles. At best it can only say, "come here, at this time, and see me for yourself," for there is no uniqueness outside of the nakedness of experience. Man must be experienced; to conceptualize him is to destroy him. "If you label me, you negate me." (Kierkegaard)

There needs to be some ideal, unique in itself, that thus concretizes the self in striving for it; for selfhood is actualized through nothing more than following the pathway of ideality. This constant struggling for it must necessarily involve feeling, even pain and suffering; thus passion -- meaning feeling -- is essential; without passion there either is no unique self, or a very limited one. Our age lacks passion, for passion necessarily involves self-assertion; to live aesthetically is to live without self-assertion -- to wait until the cards fall for you -- and therefore without passion. Our age is essentially composed of gamblers; the spirit of the gambler is our Zeitgeist -- the spirit of the times. To live aesthetically is to take the chance that one will be satiated with enough happiness by virtue of it falling from the sky, without the effect of breathing oneself into actuality; living by chance is to gamble existentially. Thus our age prefers the laziness involved with gambling over the pain involved with the greater and absolute happiness of self-assertion. Many a prattling individual will bemoan the futility of gamblers who waste their lives at the roulette tables, when they waste their lives at the table of immanence. Truly, you can find irony anywhere if you look hard enough.

Weakness

You poor wretched lovers -- you have my contempt. Is there not a single soul left in the cosmos who loves unconditionally? Yes, we can strip ourselves of everything conditional, that the loved one before us is given ourselves without the viscosity of our imperfections; we can love regardless of shortcomings, and in so loving we edify the one loved; but we cannot love when tried with separation -- no, we are too hungry for that, too weak without the presence of the other; or even worse: we are too myopic; we cannot see the other without them continually flooding our consciousness in actuality. Better to seek the inferior that can be ascertained now than actually try one's hand at commitment and all the strength that is garnered from it. There is one remarkable girl I knew, brimming with everything immaculate in character -- that is to say, someone different --, who sacrificed every possibility of seeking a man within expedience, that she might aim for the possibility of sealing a relation with her beloved that had roots in seeing him a single time a year. Once a year! I would ask her about it, and her eyes would turn pensive; she would resonate with a momentary sadness of reflection and the beauty that accompanied it, and in her heart I could feel resolution working its way through, I could feel the tension involved in pushing against the tide -- she had faith in the end, and she had faith that the transitory present exacerbated with the pain of desire would only birth an eternal appreciation when this end is finally reached. Is there anyone else like her? Have we all forgotten that life holds the greatest fruits when we push against the wind?

Fragments

Love is interesting. You fall into it. The metaphor is like a cloud that you irrevocably slide into, and it blurs your perception of everything else except the lighthouse your lover resides in. The cloud is very much alive, though at the beginning the sudden transition from the commonplace to the divinity of love is so shocking that you think otherwise. It begins to move, and you have the continual choice of moving with it and sustaining the blurred perception of objectivity, or letting it pass and with it your lover, who now becomes just another landmark you may transcend yourself towards. Why is it so preferable to stick with this cloud? Because in whittling the importance of the world down to a single soul you thereby have the most expedient method for happiness at your disposal. But denial catches up, and actuality has a twist to it that denial cannot hold down.

I listen to Elliott Smith; people ask me why, in the sense of what precisely makes him so special. I tell them: his lyrics reflect the coldness of solitude, the pangs of love, the torment of addiction, and these three things, I say, summarize rather articulately the entire spectrum of human suffering, the entire path we must walk to become ourselves.

I resign myself from society; a few wonder, a few others assume bad intentions. I cannot be quick to blame them; everything different carries the womb of possible crookedness, and for precisely this reason I hold a shallow contempt for people for reducing me to the negative end of this dialectic. I resign myself from society not to hold a secret life, but for the simple preference of my solitude. Why solitude? Because it allows the echo of my thoughts to reach me, and I have no way -- no-one has a way -- of listening to myself in the pureness of actuality. The echo exists by virtue of the elongated walls of the mind; religiously qualified, I call these walls: conscience. Conscience is a secular way of saying something shockingly explicit: God. To refuse solitude is to refuse to listen to God; and we are not called to absolute solitude, for this is impossible by virtue of doing the work we are called to, but there is nothing more dangerous for the soul than neglecting the art of being alone -- and the true artist is the one that Merton hypothesized: the one who knows how to be alone in the crowd.

About preconceptions. They are the playing cards of denial. They prohibit the universe from flooding one's consciousness. Why? Because the individual who practices this witchcraft considers human beings, whether in a limited sense or not, land that must be conquered. They must fit as you see them, or they cannot be tolerated; therefore they are far from human beings; "you" is not instrumental, but intrinsic.

Depression is the somatological result of despair; despair's signpost is the dissonance that stems from a refusal to action; action -- conscious action, where you are the actor -- is based in an ideal. This ideal is either transitory, or eternal; the former is nihilism in relation to the latter, the latter is madness in relation to the former. This eternal ideal is based in the Eternal -- which is to say, God. The ideal itself is the good for the individual, and purity of heart is to will only this (Kierkegaard). What is sin? A refusal to will this one thing, not a refusal to stand within the boundaries of absolutes: "...to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin." (James 4:17, NASB) -- for there are no absolutes. Abraham has proven this. What would seem an absolute in "thou shalt not murder" was transcended by virtue of a commandment of God; for him not to have willed murder would have been, in that case, sin; he knew the right thing to do, and did it. Therefore his faith was justified -- in planning a murder. Swallow this whole and it will cut you. And so it is: there is a relative calling for every individual with a will to be an individual. We are called to movement. "Our nature resides in movement; absolute stillness is death." (Pascal)

What does it mean to be an individual? It means to stand against the external by virtue of flowing with the internal; conversely, to stand against the internal -- God -- is to flow with the external; and if a man's life is found within -- the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:28) -- it is only destruction to consume the bread of the external. This means: being alone, understood psychically, not physically; it means, in short, detaching yourself from your immediate surroundings, and continually responding to the whispers of your conscience. It means being misunderstood. It means having your motives falsely taken for evil. It means suffering, sadness; and yet "when a face is sad a heart may be happy" (Ecclesiastes 7:3).

What is weakness? A refusal to be oneself. What is strength? A willingness to be oneself. What is true happiness? The continuity of movement that resides in willing to be oneself.

Power. It is the narcotic-substitute for living authentically; it is the happiness that exists fleetingly. With power one seeks attention; attention is the demand made by lovelessness. With power one seeks to control the universe; more: in a very real sense make the universe an extension of one's self. It is thus conditional on the world; hence power is a form of weakness. It cannot exist but as a parasite, and when it has nothing to consume it will often create its own reality; thus many schizophrenics are paradigmatically power-hungry. Again, power looks outward; thus the individual with a hunger for power is one you can observe who always sacrifices the authenticity of the moment for a possible advantage in futurity in gaining something through the existence of others. The power-hungry are history's worst communicators.

"It is a misfortune," thought Augusto, "that we need the services of things and have to make use of them. All beauty is marred by use, if not destroyed. The noblest function of things is that of being contemplated. How beautiful is an orange before dinner! In heaven all this will be changed. There our function will be reduced, rather it will be broadened into that of contemplating God and all things in him. Here, in this wretched life, we think only of putting God to use; we try to open him as we do an umbrella, in order that he may protect us from all sorts of evils." -- Miguel de Unamuno, Mist

The concept of treasure: to remain hidden. If all saw the complete unnerving beauty of a girl a certain boy held dear, would she not lose value in his eyes? She would be reduced to the commonplace; the commonplace is the antithesis to everything valuable. Shame: keeping sacred what is hidden from the outer world that does not understand. Is shame not then -- necessary; is it not also -- good?