I was Thinking Neruda

I miss her. That pretty little girl
Whose heart rings out into the world.
The one I miss even when she's standing
Firm-footed before my wishing eyes.
Retrace your steps.

Love Fearlessly

To love a human being in the deepest sense, to love before you ascertain the qualities of his or her character, to transcend the shabby preferences of adoration, to love without preference, to love in such a way where appreciation blooms as an aftereffect rather than a limitation before the involuntary binge -- this love is missing. Love without a will -- that is missing. Involuntary love -- this is why marriages break down, friendships crumble, old affections consistently precipitate in clashes.

The deepest of love is so remarkable a thing that it gives rise to multiple responses. Try it. Go into the world and love a human being before you grasp any of his "hard-earned" particulars, and admit to him that you loved him in this sense, unconditionally. If he is fit for this world, he will reciprocate with a dark stare; if he is attached to this world, he could very well hate you. Thus the test of love in relation to the world is its negative response. Love for this world means the confusion of nonbeing for being. Nonbeing, that is, the particulars that constitute the person, not the ineffable heart that holds this constitution together. Only the person who loves the eternal secret of the other can have his love resonate to the other's whole being. For the deepest love is a secret too secret for itself. It flies from the heart of the lover and plants a seed whose results the lover does not know. He only intends the goodness of the seed. Blooming in different ways, for some it is an added wonder to a perspective flooded by the celestial adoration of life; for others it is a mysteriously iridescent reason to keep on living -- if only for now. Human love is the birthing God in the soul, and what blossoms is God's enterprise.

Can love give rise to ill-temperment, brooding, even hatred? Yes -- but only the highest sort of love, unconditional love, that loves not on the basis of contingencies of personality (for all personalities, whether or not one would like to admit it, are contingent), but on essence -- on the realization of the divine "I" that is shared by all. Men prefer to be loved on the basis of their perceived excellencies, though these excellencies are often nothing more than qualities accepted and molded without effort by those who have them. Love thus understood is a transmission of mutual factual admiration. Individuals who demand to be loved in this sense, in this inferior sense, seek such because their ambition prevents a cleansed perception into the simplicity of living: that is, loving, unconditionally, perpetually, everyone and everything, for to love beyond qualities is precisely to love everyone -- and everything. Love of life, too, is a great leap before perception settles itself.

Unconditional love is fearless love. We must love fearlessly. Virtually all human beings have relational difficulties that cause them to perceive something that isn't there: a fairly conspicuous smile falsely perceived to be made in derision, a shake of the hand too strong, a look in the eyes that resembles unappreciation. What we must seek is to outrule these unintentional relational obscurities, and we can accomplish this only by loving fearlessly. Imagine a man filled to the brim with the hardness of life to such a degree where he no longer sees hardness juxtaposed with life, but only hardness. On his last transitory relation with another human being, who he may or may not know, he perceives a sense of estrangement or neglect that isn't there, and he ends up killing himself, simply because this perceived exclusion from love was the final shot that knocked down his already trembling house of cards he knew to be his general sense of hope in this world. Who is the guilty one? I say, there are many culprits, not one, though the sufficient one was that of timidity, emitted by the man who wasn't big enough to love magnanimously.

In Memory of Youth

As children we prayed with silent faces
To our calender deities, each day
toward May an added angle to our smiles.
The freedom that killed away the same,
Away from school, away from pain,
To be baptised by the crushing sun,
Drenched by the whispering water
Of summer, God's words in disguise --
That eternal waiting was our work.
All the rest was easy peasy.

Now we work incessantly, devoid
Of that bright glitter of hope we once held
In younger smiling eyes. Poor wasted world.
The point was meant another way:
That by working part-time
We should retire early, not abstracted
From life, but in love with all,
The pain entailed, for we could then unveil
Its face as the test of happiness.
Where did we go wrong?

End with a Bang

"What is talkativeness? It is the result of doing away with the vital distinction between talking and keeping silent. Only some one who knows how to remain essentially silent can really talk -- and act essentially. Silence is the essence of inwardness, of the inner life. Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it. But someone who can really talk, because he knows how to remain silent, will not talk about a variety of things but about one thing only, and he will know when to talk and when to remain silent. Where mere scope is concerned, talkativeness wins the day, it jabbers on incessantly about everything and nothing. When people's attention is no longer turned inwards, when they are no longer satisfied with their own inner religious lives, but turn to others and to things outside themselves, where the relation is intellectual, in search of that satisfaction, when nothing important ever happens to gather the threads of life together with the finality of a catastrophe: that is the time for talkativeness . In a passionate age great events (for they correspond to each other) give people something to talk about. Talkativeness, on the contrary, has, in quite another sense, plenty to talk about. And when the event is over, and silence follows, there is still something to remember and to think about while one remains silent. But talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness." -- Kierkegaard

Note

He shakes his hand but not mine, his entire stare a forced clinging to his eclipsing youth, sustained through his wit, sarcasm, and, sadly, unending flippancy. He constantly attempts to make all things funny, but thus desecrates the sacred. Does he not realize that humor is a means to filling in the gaps of the non-sacred moments of existence? I look at his truck: immaculate, enormous, expensive. He doesn't want to love. He wants to move up in this world.

Stream

To my left: artificial waterfall whir of the shower running in the other room. To my right: a fighting cicada, resisting repose, joined in by its partner at intervals to the front. Both sounds synthesize. Auricular wonder. In my heart: a raging, firebranded anger. Fade, fade. Neglected coffee cup. White, irregular state of Texas peering out at a hiding angle, the eastern lines blurred out by the overhead light. The shower stops now. The scrape of the shower curtain. The light sound of closing drawers. Cough -- cough. The cicada has stolen me again. Door opens. Belt buckle jingle. Another door closes, with a reluctant sqeak. Somehow, somehow, all is right with the world. The now discernable ticking of the clock ineffably tells why. As if in time with the heartbeat of God.

The coffee cup again; the braggart state again. Live in a state with squiggles, a comedian has said. Footsteps, hollow floor. A person. "I need to get my own alarm clock." Barely hoarse voice. Steps, receding. Someone forgot to feed the dog. She needs to go. A mistake -- too large. Bad judgement.

The coffee cup again. Three-hundred degree angle from me. Books behind the coffee cup. Two stacks, five and five, reciprocated with large volumes: Ulysses, left, bottom; The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, right, top. The door is open -- the cicadas pour through.

The anger is gone. But a problem lies beneath, backbone of negativity. A thought to muffle it. Her. To think, I haven't fallen in love in a while. Eyes burning............The clock again. Click. Click. Click.

Joyce isn't that breathtaking a writer. Why Nabokov praises him so much -- the words, he says: thirty-thousand original words. So what? Hickish words, pedestrian fusings. Snotgreen. Milkwhite. So what? Nothing special. Not like Vladimir.

The decayingly long route of publication. Took one from his early twenties to his mid-thirties before his attempts precipitated in a positive response, and still, he says, there are gems undiscovered, or cropped over by virtue of the excremental prose that gets published a hundred times in comparison with mediocrity. To think that being published is a necessarily high acheivement. In reality, a recognition of one's mediocrity. The high beyond the aesthetic powers of the crowd -- that is the foreign. The few appreciate the good that translates as foreign to the mediocre. All probability is against me. But the voice is insistent: write. Write. God wouldn't imply a lie, would He? Imply a lie. Beautiful.

World, you've stripped me. Terrifying to discover what is left when all earthly hopes have disappeared. A glimmer of divinity? Or nothing? I feel something. Look at the brilliant symmetrical reflection of the pyramid-dotted spherical light on the television. A light streaming out of a two-dimensional cave. Brilliant, impressive, but not beautiful. It can't be beautiful. It smacks of means.

Girl, girl, girl. You go to church incessantly; hardly a week without your presence. But why, hm, are all your pictures brimming with attractive people, "in" individuals, the accepted, the wealthy? A reason to sleep in on Sundays. Churches at the genesis of Christianity were safe-havens for individuals who wanted nothing more than to share divine interactions in an altruistic spirit. To rejoice over the faith of their equally persecuted comrades. Today church is just another social institution. Alcohol for the sober. Tradition regurgitated. Blessed are those who want something more.

I have an entire cosmic symphony with this clickety-clock, with these restless cicadas! The secret to life is this: become aware. The very greatest symphony of all may be found in silence. And the most profoundly deep individuals know how to find this silence in the midst of the very business of life.

Become as Children

"Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." -- Matthew 18:3 (NASB, emphasis mine)

A man with the entire history of the ideas of philosophy incarnated on his actually infinite bookshelf without the gospels could never, in all his extraction from such texts, arrive at the shocking and eternally beautiful maxim Jesus holds: become as children. Children! If anything the world would force a conclusion that is the exact opposite: seek wealth, influence over others, power! Or the notorious barbaric stupidity accepted so innocently from once-innocent youths from their fathers: be a man! That is, throw your life to shit but be accepted doing it: that's all that counts. Be a man truly means be for others, which means: you are too unmanly, too unwilling to be a human being, to be yourself, for you cannot be a human being without being the being you are designed to be. Be a man means: be anything but a man; take the path of simplicity, never assert yourself in such a way that demands the pain necessary for sustaining your personality. Be a man: augment the physical, grow mad muscles, always waver between a stage of soberness and inebriation -- an existence that is actually better understood as being-towards-inebriation. Be a man, where everything is for the sake of "the weekend", "the sports game", "getting lucky", the dehumanization of women, the negation of pure relation with others, the perversion and instrumentation of the entire beautiful world, addiction, attachment, bondage, misery, frustration, death, despair, despair, despair! Be a man! Kill yourself!

Become as children! I have in mind the illuminating age of three to five, where the world bursts with mystery, where all things resonate with exuberance and newness, where life itself is almost exhausted by the inexhaustible curiosity of the child and its careless extraction of all the goodness the world itself holds. At approximately seven the greatest tragedy unfolds itself in the very midst of the garden of Eden: hyper-selfconsciousness blooms on the scene, and the seedlings of the adult makes itself known. Aware of itself, the child loses itself in the infinite negation of negative inwardness. The realization is a conflagration of fear and anxiety, and anxiety, being based in possibility -- the possibility involved with freedom -- proves that the grand gift of freedom necessarily has a tormenting birth. Nonetheless anxiety has a basis: future action; the torment of what you could be called to do for any situation. The sting of anxiety is the realization that anything at all could happen. Fear, healthy in itself (that intuitive instinct that serves in the bloodstream of the prudent like a light unto their feet), becomes intensified through anxiety: one fears not a particular object, a stimulus, but the possibility of an object, a stimulus, as yet unknown. Only until this child, now clothed in the destitution of its own overflowing self-consciousness, gains salvation -- relatively or absolutely, that is, religiously -- does this disease continue to thrive. Salvation -- that is, willing the singular, the good. "Purity of heart is to will one thing," free-floated the words of of that dexterous-minded Dane, Kierkegaard. Salvation is the commitment to this singularity, and more: the attachment of oneself to it as the greatest hope for oneself. The heavenly hope, born not of this world, based not on necessity and contingency -- the methods that this world espouses --, but between man and God, particular for each and every man, found in the Eternal consciousness of man, the revelation of this command, this law (as Emerson called it), and the continual existential recollection of it -- that is the quintessential cure for superfluous anxiety (and not all anxiety is superfluous), the beast whose fuel is a concern for the world around it, and a holding of value in something that can be lost in it, be it something physical, material, or more abstract, such as money, or, perhaps the most popular of all: reputation. Reputation is an implicit deal with appearance, and appearance is the meat that the world feeds on. But the child! He knows no value in money, least of all reputation! He has no value for looking good, fitting in, conformity. Its own body is valuable insofar as the immediacy of negative stimuli are concerned -- keep away from what hurts. If the world would only keep to this, the rest of life would come breaking towards it with such enthusiasm that strength would be born simply in pushing against this glorious tide.

More: the child knows how to hold on to each moment, consume its experiences, digest them, let them go, and move on. It holds no grudges, do not transfer whatever fears you experience into memory, thus translating them to, again, anxiety. The world is blown away in the unbroken cycle of anxiety: that great precendent to incredible choices has swallowed the weaker constitutions of the world -- and how many there are! -- thus the primary secular salvation is found in formulating methods by which to escape from it! But children! They experience it in its appropriate context and are not clogged with the unending pessimism involved with looking ahead to anxious situations -- thus creating anxiety at that moment! Their anxiety has a season.

What else? Trust. Trust implies a half-consciousness of that which provides in the mode of the provider. The babe that trusts its father is less aware of the father as a provider than as a father himself. Trust is always inferior to the stream of love, for it is born of love. It also entails a continual choice in relation to the one trusted, thus making the antithesis to trust (sin) possible. Children also make choices, and what paragonal choice-makers they are! What shame they put adults to, these anxious prattlers, despairing shadow-selves, quick to hit any form of insulation to save them from actualizing themselves in this world. Children know their contexts; they accept their misakes, their rebellions, their excellencies, and, once again, move on. They hold true a parental version of Luther's oft-misunderstood statement: love God and sin boldly! For the child: love those you have trust in, and break from this trust boldly! Their audacity is the only thing that makes them capable of being punished sufficiently, thus refined sufficiently. Even adults have no power to authentically, defiantly sin against those in whom they place their trust, God or man. Caught up in the stop of resentment and the envy and cowardice inherent to it, they speak in whispers, behind the backs of those perceived as culprits, and never learn to forget what has been done to them. Unlike children! Do children even have a concept of resentment? A boy is more likely to punch another boy in the arm than hold ill-defined feelings for him past his bed-time -- feelings that would only swarm until resentment is full-blown. Child, you have sinned boldly, and now you can taste the purifying though bitter waters of punishment, and learn to purge the devils that chase you. An adult -- ah, he doesn't even have devils; like his very self, he drags with him demon shades, whose voices speak as softly as he does. He can find no momentary superficial freedom in going through with these thin little demons, but instead: the everlasting hell of contempt that has no legs to stand for itself and finish the situation now fulminating in the bedraggled walls of his mind. That is the hell of resentment.

Trust, that is: let go of the world, for you believe that someone else holds it for you. The state of affairs is such that even if one confesses himself to be a Christian there is no palpable conviction of a divine providence watching over the world. Christians push it off to the after-life, where punishments will be handled so-called accordingly, meanwhile anyone with a dying voice of justice breaks through a rainbow of colors on his countenance in view of the injustices that clutter the world today. What does a child do? He may be exasperated at his seen unfairness, but if he is in the right company, he looks to his father, and even if the father apparently does nothing the child still has comfort in the perceived power of the father to keep things in line so that child -- doesn't have to. For power is implied in repose just as much as it is in actualizing itself. A king has power without commanding a single subject, just as much as the king who moves armies to conquer.

How insightful it was for that neglected existential-psychoanalyst Leslie Farber to speak of the loss in the belief in a divine will that keeps this world in sufficient condition for those who believe in Him, and how the prevalent loss of belief in this will can result only in neurosis. This relates directly to trust; faith is trust. To have faith in God is to trust Him, and without the feeling of an overseeing will that relates to the world and holds it together, the self will naturally strive to hold it together himself. Pure, concentrated madness. And this is where the person who follows through with this mode ends up -- in insanity. Think of the obsessive compulsive personalities. What is their psychosis based in? Bad neuro-transmitters? Well, yes, to a degree. But ideologically understood, the problem is based in -- a loss of trust: trust that the world will be alright without the assertion of one's will to make it alright. "Alright" here is meiotic for perfection, and perfection, it must be noted, is a relative state: bestness per moment, if you like. The fulfillment of potentialities; the greatest an entity or subject can be at any particular moment (thus the statement in the bible becomes possible, but horrifying: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." -- Matthew 5:48). The person struck with OCD has no concept of perfection in this sense; perfection for him or her is an absolute goal, an impossible, unreachable, goal, not a higher dimension within time towards another (continually shifting) goal. The Christian goal is to will the good, and in willing it salvation (or living in truth) is the continual reward. When one mis-acts and fails (or better, refuses) to will the good, another chance is there in the next moment (repentence is the return to this wholeness through correct willing). That is ideally what is needed.

The child -- ah, endless fount of wisdom -- knows how to take the world unseriously, and in taking the world unseriously, it can take its own fun seriously. "A man's maturity," says Nietzsche, "consists in having found again the seriousness one has as a child, at play." Seriousness toward the world stems from a desire to gain something from it. Men go as far as to manipulate the world, and the people in it (thus dehumanizing them), in order to get what they want, and this oftentimes means getting the attention, the pure perception, the love, of others. And for a while they may have what they want, but always, always actuality falls short of the demand, the desire. Resignation is needed. Ah, resignation -- truly the hardest act a person can muster. Few do. It means an act of conscious forgetting, of throwing away for the fulfillment of the paradoxical demand of happiness: give that you might gain. It means supressing that which is bringing you down, freezing your consciousness on a single past even or idea or person -- letting them go. Children -- they have no need for resignation. They have no need to get ahead in the world, and forgetting comes naturally for them. Each problem dissolves with the hours that succeed them. The goal of resignation should be a conditioned capacity to forget easier. The child is here our master.

Thus it is: to be a Christian is to be as a child; not childish, but child-like. To be child-like is to essentially move on, digest one's experiences, greet the day and the stuttering souls within it without predispositions, without the paltriness of intersubjective quibbles, and thereby learn to love whatever one finds himself in front of. Aha, you may be thinking, children are not as ideal as you present them: they are selfish, complaining, starving for attention. Yes, but children know how to sin; the depravity of humanity magnified as it is in the adult reveals that not only has he no grasp of righteousness, no continuity in doing good, but also that he is clueless as to how to even properly sin, and that is: in the moment, and leave it behind. The child, as a paradigm for a spiritual state, would be a terrible paradigm if it had little to no relation to man's potentialities, to his dark sides, to sin when it presents itself. Blessed are you child, for you, like nature, are everywhere, and yet we have no yees to see the wisdom you have for us each and every day.

We are called to become as children! There is no greater sanctuary for paradox than Christianity. And there is no greater sanctuary for awe than paradox.

Ode to a Maybe-Wife

The girl looks out with a shadowed smile,
Black eyes to match the blackest moods
That fly away from each and every soul
At the moment their eyes embrace her own.
Strange girl, made from ideas and joy,
Whose presence recollects you to the sun.

Ah, and add to this I've never met her.
And suddenly the art of dancing
Finds my self now willing to explore,
With gleaming eyes and nerve-less arms,
With all the beauty of the world,
Including her.

Contrast is Everything

There was a young man I knew, before my life had the color it has now: he was what one might call a madman, the strange thing being that features gave the appearance of the everyday: clean-shaven, healthy skin, piercing blue eyes; but his smile –- ah, his smile was sheer savagery, and I was among his victims.

His apparent task in life was to run across anyone he found while telling them, with an apocalyptic insanity, lips doused with an almost hyperkinetic blur, “contrast is everything!” incessantly, as if his single mission in life was to drive to the ground anyone he saw with these same stubborn words –- never a change, never a break, always the same; we were flogged with it. He would wander the streets, systematically, over and over, like an echo granted flesh, seeking people he had seen the day before, his insistence carrying the shadow of a stalker, and never without –- mark this –- his beloved saxophone –- a tenor saxophone: a worn-down, neglected, ragamuffin instrument, without a single patch of sheen, littered with rust, long since dropped by the warm hands of beauty. You would never see him without it.

Our group was composed of five or six. We met on a somewhat-grassy portion of land, a sort of meeting-ground between our respective apartments, amidst other groups: men without need to mention, who preferred their covert identities. We were nothing more than common men striving towards the medians or our lives; we knew what it was to settle down; we knew, yes, mediocrity; we knew the same. All we wanted in life was to enjoy the dying day under the blushing rays of the sun at the last patch of land this enormous city seemed close to stealing from us. But him – he would walk up to our group at approximately six o’clock every single day for over a week, cut in his worn-out maxim during our conversations, and always –- always! –- paint his same tiring phrase with a horrendous attempt at improvisation on that fucking little saxophone. The noise was always enough to unravel my nerves, freeze my frame with contempt. My response was always an endless flinch. Imagine a duck on a loquacious drinking-binge. You have it.

And the scene never changed: after playing a few pseudo-notes in various places, the walls bleeding in pain, the very oxygen of the place on the verge of splitting town, the whole performance each time lasting no more than two minutes, he would break out with “contrast is everything!” spoken with what seemed like such a careless seriousness, almost as if he was mocking us for being ignorant of this strange idea he preached. Again, again, again, inexorably – a tenth ring for Dante were eternity ever added –- “contrast is everything! Contrast is everything! Everything!” He abused his instrument; he abused us. A sparkling smartass in our clique joked how both he and the saxophone needed a hundred hours of psychotherapy. God knows we tried to put up with him; and God knows we lost.

Patience was worn. One day he walked up to our particular group –- I’m sure he planned this –- and pulled out the same farce as before. Bad notes, bad notes, “contrast is everything!” bad notes, bad notes, an nausea-inspiring run down a chromatic scale, and, always: “contrast is everything!”. The crowd, our group included, was by now ready to lynch him. A man whose sufferings gave the appearance of an older age than he actually was, whose face some said was worn with unnamable suffering, broke out in a not-quite-trot, stopping three feet before him, screaming the words “goddamnit man! What the hell are you talking about?” staring down the madman-saxophonist with eyes gasping for understanding. The he was me.

The savage was unswayable: he made a break for a little free safety by walking a few feet away, and while he was escaping, he continued this ridiculous absurdity. Ruffling my hair in despair, oscillating looks between him and the other men there, I wanted to tear him to pieces. I felt myself magnetized towards him; clawing involuntary in his direction, he flew away: he leaped onto some unimportant steps, and with his new altitude, broke into the strangest repose. For five seconds he stared us down, smiled, closed his eyes (which he had never done before), and placed his lips again to the mouthpiece. I flinched in advance.

Superfluously. Starting on a high voluptuous D, he slipped his way down his own little scale with a deftness and seduction that I had never heard before, tone tapering with an immaculate vibrato, and more, more, more. The emanations that flowed from that bedraggled instrument I could not believe I was hearing. Coltrane had no touch on him. It was the most remarkable piece of music I had ever heard, and played with such passion! It pierced my heart, and left me in a convulsion of shivers, a jangling mass of nerves. The feeling wasn’t that different from falling in love, and exactly like it I had to catch my breath again.

Gazing at him, my shock freely showing, I finally looked back at the rest of my group: everyone else was the same; a few people one could easily assume were dead –- the animation was so long forgotten in their transfixed eyes. One man had this moment forever symbolized by the burn-hole in his spotted gray shirt, the helpless culprit the equally shocked cigarette that dropped from his gape-jawed mouth and burned until he burned. It was as if some strange and fantastic deity was translated into music, and each man here applauded with his own unique silence, his own astonished face.

After he finished this solo, so caught up in himself in performing it, he opened his eyes to the crowd now ready to adore him –- this crowd, just now planning a murder; this crowd, led by my very self in leading him to the gallows -–, and, with the strangest look, something of a mixture of gentleness and mischievousness, his eyes glowing lampposts that penetrated the fog of our incredulity, he said in a half-whisper, half-reproach, half-warning, like the noble Christ resting his Beatitudes on the consenting crowd below him:

“Contrast is everything.” He walked from the place with a look of satisfaction, a sort of affectionate laughter in his eyes, leaving footsteps of eternity in his place, and passed right by me, just after softly grazing his burning fingers to my shivering elbow, a frozen mystique sweet-set in his radiant blue eyes. Beauty like that deserves laughter, and laugh I did. I laughed until my eyes leaked. That day his madness became mine.

And we never saw him again. He apparently knew his own gospel.