Spheres

A second ago the air the same

now vaulted in a spherical film

wobbly, iridescent, tense

now two different airs

inbetween, the thin pellicle

clearcut yet transparent

slowly, as water drains out,

the black spots turn into a film

darker than closed-eyelid eigengrau

the tension surfacing rapidly

some symbol hanging there

love perhaps, life, death, whatnot.

perhaps someone’s ego

protected at all costs

until something runs out

then the air in, out, the same.

Hic Sunt Monstris

 
"Let me state for the record that I am second to none in decrying, loathing, and desiring to defeat those who wish to replace freedom with religious tyranny of the most brutal kind--and who have murdered countless innocent civilians in cold blood. Their acts are monstrous and barbaric. But I differ from Krauthammer by believing that monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder--just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit.

And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value."

Extract from the article "The Abolition of Slavery" in The New Republic (Dec. 19, 2005), by Andrew Sullivan (British-American author, editor, blogger).

Source for the quote

 

"What is the moon, what is the moon?"

 

Change is a constant

“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.” in The Summing Up (1938), p. 306.

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

The Odyssei

 
Another bottom-shelf Odysseus thinking
having a lofty goal is all that matters,
that Ithaca is just the one place,
that the destination is everything.

Those Odyssei merit to feed the crabs,
or to rot on the shoreline in the sun,
kelp in their matted hair and beards.

The fool will get lost indeed, and drown
– manly him and his ignorant ideals –
he will only find gods and monsters,
marred plans and fleeting riches,
unmemorable deserted islands,
– not the Penelope his guts are yearning for,
the Ithaca of Ithacas, the journey of journeys.

Those tacky, fragile amphoras of Odyssei
praise the wine, the flagon, the cellar,
forget the vineyard, the soil, the sun,
that Penelope handpicked the grapes.

This Odysseus remembers her proud beauty,
everyone’s envy, her shimmering garment,
he trusts in the olive tree’s roots in his bed,
in his aura to ensure none replace him
– forgets Penelope is the weaver, the teller,
has ousted many of those brash Odyssei,
elects who will rule and who will fall.

In this Ithaca, as in all other Ithacas,
many an Odysseus ended up a beggar,
ignored, unsung, wishing he remembered
how Penelope smelt of tangerine,
how she used to own the night,
herself an Ithaca without a map,
the reason, bearing, quest, and deed.

 

Fragment #199

It is cold in my heart, and the blizzard rages, rages

yet turning around I see one long line of footsteps,

steady in the snow – the fact that it is fading

is irrelevant to the purpose which brought me here –

home awaits at the end of the journey,

warmth will come back and thaw.

Still, a long way to go yet.

Resilience

 
"Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Extract from Ulysses (written 1833, published 1842), by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

 

Missing

—

something

amiss

off

unthere

—

missing someone

is hard on the heart

—

guts twisted like a wet rag

with every single recollection

—

shivved in the chest

at the first memory

with a notched blade

grazing bones, tissues

exposing the flesh

so it cannot heal

—

every DNA monomer

branded, rewired, retranslated

so even the sense of smell

gets tricked into thinking

– the memories are real –

– the missing isn’t missed –

only to each time find out

– the heart heaving as

going down a steep slope –

that the missing is decohered

– neither here and – nor – there –

unable to freeze it into place

if one stares at it long enough

– love unaffected by

any law of physics –

—

the air unbreathable as

every pulmonary alveolus

collapses like a promise

when holding it fails

– the only option is to hold

– breath, attention, heart –

and sit still – so very still –

counting heartbeats to zero

until infinity hits

—

missing someone

is hard on the heart

– shattering its walls –

– supposedly denser

than the core

of a neutron star –

into absolute smithereens

– its ash to be repurposed

but for now, for what, for what

—

missing someone

is hard on the heart

– but missing someone

you’re never to see again

– that lays the heart

to unequivocal waste.

Pikakari Rand

The time of allshine

A shooting star like a van gogh brush stroke

cleaves the night into two resplendent parts

you ask me to make a wish

I close my eyes and implore

that ball of ice streaking across the void

to make me unknow you – as if we never met

not so I can meet you again for the first time

but so I can unthink of you forever

so I can start breathing and dreaming again

so I am unlocked in your love 

so I can unlive our happiness together

this so dearly-bought, terrible euphoria

which cost me all the peace I had.

Eyes still closed, the heart pounding,

I’m giving everything I have

to whatever force there is

in this hope-hued meteor

this lone rover I long to be

so you unexist in me now

so I am myself, once again.

 

Broken

When you implied

it was nice of me 

to disregard my feelings

over yours

– you broke something –

When you said

you had the premonition

we’d meet again

and then said we wouldn’t

– you broke something –

When you said you cared

but stopped paying attention

or asking how I was

or who I was becoming

– you broke something –

Yet you don’t realise this,

as all this is normal for you as

feelings are best read about in books

are what happens to other people

those with much sadder lives

– so you feel safe, don’t you –

Truth is, you broke so many things

you put so much distance between us

that we cannot go back to where we were

and this is probably what you want

because happiness scared you

you felt too young for it

not enough chaos

so you broke

and broke

until

 

.

Tallinn sunset

 

(Click on the pictures for a larger image)

 

A farewell to her

I just finished reading Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms again, because even though it's described as a war novel, it's mainly a novel about love. And let's face it, I'm looking for solace. Yet I was looking for a particular passage (no, not that overhyped, overtattoed, decontextualised Instagram trope), but when the page finally came, I was confused, it winded me. The words struck me more personally than ever before. It was my second time reading it, and a decade earlier...I was less experienced. But now I realise how much less experienced I was. The sentiments Hemingway expressed, here and now they were mine...up until just a few weeks ago. There is no denying this experience greatly enriched me, and to paraphrase Woolf: I welcomed the wild horse in me. Here's the passage in question, halfway down Chapter 34. I sure hope you can relate...as even though these things have passed, they have been, and they were good. Probably the best.


“That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal.

We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once.

I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

 

Solitary spaces

 

« Et tous les espaces de nos solitudes passées, les espaces où nous avons souffert de la solitude, désiré la solitude, joui de la solitude, compromis la solitude sont en nous ineffaçables. Et très précisément, l’être ne veut pas les effacer. Il sait d’instinct que ces espaces de sa solitude sont constitutifs. Même lorsque ces espaces sont à jamais rayés du présent, étrangers désormais à toutes les promesses d’avenir, même lorsqu’on n’a plus de grenier, même lorsqu’on a perdu la mansarde, il restera toujours qu’on a aimé un grenier, qu’on a vécu dans une mansarde. »

Gaston Bachelard (French philosopher, 1884-1962), Poétique de l'espace.

 

Fragment #113

I never said I would

ever write a poem

about us

writing about love

can’t have been

about us

those poems I never wrote

and never will write

about us

are like the tears

we’ve never shed

as they weren’t

about us

The right to forget

– please let me go

so I can begin

to exist again

let me walk away

in the quiet of dawn

to deaden the hurt

– let go of my hand

so it regains the colour

unheld hands have

– for new things to begin

one needn’t

constantly resist

you know, or oppose,

you know, one can

simply unlove

simply forget

– please accept the return of

those gifts you left me

– those warm memories

that comfort as much

as they hurt –

only then can there be

the quiet, slow forgetting

one needs to uncast the mind

to trick the brain to unlove

– the skin hunger

will make the soul wilt:

this is expected

– it will ravage the mind:

that is also expected

– but it is necessary, 

like a soothing hand

wiping the sweat off

the evil the night accrued

shushing me back to sleep

– please give me back

my beloved solitude

so I can start anew

from the fond place

I once called home

– without you and

the memories of you

each of them like

the smell of a burning barn,

the screams of trapped animals

prickling the nape of the neck

in the afternoon heat

– let all your whirlwinds die down

– let your sandstorm be swept in corners

– erase yourself off of the back of my eyelids

where I hope to find a measure of peace

– fade from the mirror when next to me

you took a place none can take again

– let the ice sheet you cast about my heart

slowly thaw into caves, dark blue clearing,

where echoes thin into whimpers

and long-lost feelings of imprecision

of nearaboutedness resurface

slowly, drop after drop,

enabling me to crawl back to my old,

blurry, incomplete, terrible self

– inevident but firm, solid,

but much more vast and secure

than the island we lived on

in the comfortableness 

a loved one’s arms bring

in the sureness one feels

in the omphalos of the storm

where the calm jades

and love sustains

yet brings about that feeling

that it can be lost,

untrusted, or simply obscured 

by other islands coming into view

as the sun wanes

and the hand that once caressed

now blanches at the joints

in one last effort to retain

– please let me go

– because if you do not

I shan’t have the strength

it takes to break

the sentiments

to cover the soul

with that thin veil

against doubt and

against myself

and appreciate

the forgetting

the fading

of what

you once

were

Ukko

I have seen flame auroras

mirror across frozen lakes

the ice singing underfoot

the heart of the stars, pounding

a white fox on the hunt

twilit eyes straight at me

and the knife at my chest

both of us ignoring the call

In the night of night

dance crackling fireflies

spangle the dark of the eyes

fairy about the flames

A thunderstruck tree

split in twain, waits for me

nods at my presence

smelling of cinder and hope.