Wise, or pessimistic.

"Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody."

Benjamin Franklin, again.

Quote for the Randy One(s)

"It is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it." Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

 

27 Scenes viewed from a 361° angle - PDF

27 Scenes viewed from a 361° angle

27 Scenes viewed from a 361° angle

 

*

Umpteen years to the day since the first mention of time,

Man is still crippled, bed-ridden with punctual rheumatisms,

Struggling to come to terms with the bleakness of his existence –

The one which he himself tailor-made for himself.

Sartorial adjustments left uncared for by the Maid.

She went unexpectedly. The Mat Salleh opines

She couldn't have walked away.

*

The darkest season of the year falls like a fiery curtain –

None alive was there to listen but the unborn son.

Folks were expecting much more on his account.

Church-goers had huddled in for the last of the last sermons –

The long-awaited Apocalypse had finally come.

*

The most insane act of man has yet to be witnessed.

*

Halfway between the gutter and the stars

We glare at our pathless feet pointing inwards,

Unbeknownst and unacknowledged travellers –

Our passport to Reality has just expired,

And there remains the only world available to us:

Technicoloured and photoshoped on glossy, inkwashed paper.

*

However numerous and enticing the parallel universes may be,

None is accessible – we have yet to realise this:

– Schrödinger's cat like a jack-in-the-box –

No main or least universe, just this mean one.

What shall become of us when all tracks lead somewhere?

Lost shall be in us the singular, innate capability

Which differentiate upright beings from the rest:

The nomadic freedom of the walker.

No migratory instinct may ever compete with this.

Neither the act of speech, or that of dreaming,

Are exclusive to man and testimony to his supremacy.

– But we are gradually losing the ability to stand erect –

That fight was undergone at dawn by apes in which we lost interest.

Why should we care for something we take for granted?

The dos and the don'ts of a generation of horizontal individuals

Are all as one iterated in the assumed right not to vote.

The lives of others carry no weight whatsoever

On the scales of the en vogue priorities.

*

We have to admit it: we are lost.

Fumbling for clothes in the dark,

On the lookout for a Man with enough leadership

To be revealed as our trans-generational spokesperson,

Sentinelled for a credo, a tangible self in hardships,

Expecting the outbreak of war – our own appointed time to prove ourselves,

Our fathers and our children that we can crusade for something,

Let alone our values which we would be hard put to define –

Bidding our time for a happenstance to become an epiphany.

We thus created swarms of pastimes and postiches

To accommodate our fear of tomorrow and tomorrow,

Unmindful that sunrise and sunset are bound to be,

That we ought to abide by Carpe diem,

Quam minimum credula postero.

*

The droves herein gathered hover without aim,

Find symbols and codes and alternatives

In the alignment of the long-muted spheres,

Expect oracles out of red moons and mock-suns,

Scry their laptop screens for news past and to come.

We do not trust religion to bridge the gap,

Yet we do not believe science will untie the knot.

Politics is a business and vice versa.

Where should the truth lie, if not in ourselves?

Yet we are unqualified to dig with our fingernails.

*

Leaves upon leaves gather in the abandoned curtilage where

Children have put aside their childish games and prattle

And play adults when their parents long for those bygone days.

*

Man is a born paradox.

Why should he, of all creatures, harness the earth?

He who is the least responsible for his actions?

He puts blinkers on the horse yet the horse leads him.

He puts fetters of iron on nought and none else but himself.

Man is a born paradox.

*

All the ducks leave when Winter waxes,

While follow eyes the steady flight

Grounded in the smog of the everyday,

While elephantine clouds occlude the rainbow.

The infallible smell of rust in the blood for a time congealed

As the ponds freeze and thaw and solidify again.

You never savoured this smell anyway,

Seeking refuge in the sanitised eight times a day handrails,

Cringing at the flush-your-own-toilet radio advertisement.

There is something rotten in the state of things that are.

Summer always had your preference though, like a favoured child.

Unwilling to hurt yet unable to repress your scathing remarks

Which are liquid pain transfused clogging arteries:

Mortal sap to the sane tree.

*

Your skin yesterday tasted of lodestone,

When as a child I would tip the tip of my tongue

On one of the fridge's magnets, fearing

An electric shock which never came. It tasted of salt.

Of course love is out of the question.

*

Flipping sandal by the meridian pool.

Irritation in your voice masticating diamonds.

Where have the children gone, you ask.

They are floating quietly on the surface of the waters,

Face downwards, forever holding their breaths.

Patiently waiting for you to turn around,

And pay attention.

Life is cruel to us sometimes,

Rummaging in the night like hedgehogs in the shrub,

Making a racket that might even send a blade of grass fluttering.

Lilies and fireflies show little concern to the plights beguiling us.

Someone has to die, as tacitly agreed, and preferably the innocent:

The diary of hate must still be written.

*

The horror, the horror, is never complete without a couple of rivets

To hold the complete picture on the wall of Gethsemane.

Men have died erecting these walls,

And the mortar thereof was juiced from swollen leeches.

The flesh is weak, once be proof the Dutch's ear.

The spirit is weak, thrice be proof the Galilean's will.

Faith in retrospect, once cleared from doubt, only is powerful.

In this garden blossomed a redefined boundary to love,

Breast-fed, as behovely as breathing, thus

As necessary as the song of the thrush –

Though it was a stage in falsetto.

*

Somnolence descending upon us with drooping head,

Heavy eyelids and hypnic jerks.

Only in sleep could they serve Jesus.

Only in that in-between state could He serve Him.

Wakefulness is left to the cornered mendicant.

Restlessness and the lust for sex

Spreading outside the walls of burning Babylon.

Nurtured gals have been reported sprawling in the prairies,

Legs wide opened and with febrile fingers stroking their gorge.

Nothing unusual in the ruttish dreamer's dream,

But any hermit would frown and growl and scowl,

Tutting and shaking his shaved head at this waste of energy.

*

“This marred and clumsy world

Will remain marred and clumsy,

However hard we try to change it.

The day is lost. Why should we toil

And grunt and sweat for this weary life?”

Cried ye in the cold, crucial night,

Spellbound by the raging bonfire of solitudes

Crackling before your bewildered eyes.

Yet vulnerable daffodils still prosper:

Why shouldn't we dear, why shouldn't we.

The hellbent Erynies of the day

Quench their divine vendettas

On the unhappy masses of mundane heretics,

Lighting pyres with their fat and bones,

Blazing knolls licking the flat clouds.

*

“You fake it as you make it,”

Could have been said by both.

Only I could have replied that

The scherzo backed me up.

*

I know you never wanted to hurt me, but you did, darling, but you did.

I know you never wanted to scorch me, but you did darling, but you did.

I know you wanted me whole, wanted my soul too, you did darling you did.

Yet you murdered me darling, you did.

In the empty streets of the French capital city, dull with rain and grime,

You and I roam unhindered, losing our sanity in the cafés and the opéras and Montmartre,

Moving more and more to the South as the clouds grow wilder, purple with anger.

We might never have met, as you suggested one evening,

But we have, darling, we have, and that was all that mattered then.

Now I watch you watching my coffin,

I hate you, Darling, I hate you.

*

The Willing Suspension of Disbelief coiled in the fold of the navel,

Authorising the boldest moves, including sahara-trekking

With only a half-empty, gargling gourd of water at the side.

Some would even go as far as obliterating Iago themselves on stage,

As snogging the movie away at the back of a cinema.

Planting the seed of the apricot they have just eaten in their backyard.

Sieving gold in the Euphrates.

Paring their fingernails.

Hanging themselves.

*

Dawn fell harshly on the idols which failed to pass the test of time,

Now resting and rusting full fathoms within the oceans,

Or displayed as testimonies to our lack of insight, to our gullibility,

Blind guesses to make out a reason, to give shape to the truth

Because so much beauty and mire couldn't but spring from the Gods.

Yet we are left here, on this ball of magma, to figure it out on our own.

No wonder we stumble over pitfalls and graves,

Even though words like fissure, or crevice

Are undefinable with or without matter.

Nothing good will ever come out of such emptiness.

Intestine wars have been fought for the sake of the Zero,

That nonsensical loop in the history of thought,

Which brought nations to less than nothing.

Man's pragmatism brings him more comfort

Than his capacity for abstraction.

Now we must never forget that words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still. Too often the current wind

Bend them to a slant. Halt them to a standstill.

Words cannot be trusted.

Yet they are the longest-standing bulwark,

And door to, the corporeal.

Live by the word, die by the word.

*

Expectation is the key to the discernment

Of the last five hundred thousand years of this era,

Or rather the absence of it.

Erwartungshorizont funnelled

Paving the way to insanity

Obliging the traveller

To walk all the way down,

Without a single glance back,

Without a sospiro to attract pathos.

The trapper in the tundra keeping away from satiety to stay alert –

Packs of Wolves roaming the frozen wilderness.

Lichen-covered permafrost and glacial forests,

Nature at its most basic, Nature at its deadliest.

Palpitating hearts as the wolf's howl is heard booming,

Close-up shot of the lupus' head, icy locks and exhaled breath.

The darkness of the room helps feel the fear of the trapper.

The trapper remains cool-headed, for even though he doesn't dread death,

He values it at the wolf's fang.

*

I enjoyed all those moments of humanity I shared with them,

The parties, the clubs, the whores, the dinners

Now I leave all those for the others.

Too many expectations at stake.

Too many seduction games going on.

Human relationships indeed are a luxury,

And it seems I cannot afford them,

Being too poor in that currency

Most people seem to have in abundance:

A keen lust for the flirtatious,

Toying with it as we do with ersatz

– Still less important and fragile than the original,

Which we hoard until we deem the day has come.

This is pure blindness – we are fooling ourselves.

Perhaps with growing impotency grows intolerance.

Times are a-changing at too fast a pace,

Keeping up is ridiculous to the old

And sacrilegious to the young.

Eremitic lives forever await the cantankerous.

*

If the teacher had said: “Memento mori, boys.”,

Their lives would have been tainted blacker than soot,

And the lad would have precipitated his suicide.

Molly wouldn't have been stoned to death for adultery.

The face of this earth would be quite different.

For here be ghosts, ghouls and monsters, and corpses by the billions,

Recorded souls since Dawn first set eyes on the Grim Reaper.

Bleak prospects.

*

The gnomon on the South-facing sundial refracts perspective:

It was bought for three dollars at the church's car-boot fair.

Being defective, it'll be sold at next week's bric-a-brac sale.

Only the choicest may see the dust of our homes.

*

Daydreaming my death the other day,

I found out no one would cry,

No one would be disfigured by a heartbroken rictus,

No one would attend the church service,

No one would attend to my mortal coil,

All would leave the city officials to dispose of it accordingly:

Atop a heap of sun-dried, foul garbage, circled by winged scavengers.

Nothing is more certain than my imminent death.

*

The sea was black with fish and on the boiling surface

Silver coins scaled up to the horizon.

Fishermen were bedazzled, net in hand and mouth agape.

Boats were rocking unnaturally, hardly wet. One got sea-sick.

*

The Absentee has been sought everywhere.

The summits of the Himalayas have been scrutinised

And their snow sprinkled on golf courses.

The sands of the Taklamakan have been sieved

And poured into concrete megalopoli.

The Seas and the Oceans have been dried up

And their bottom raked and exposed thoroughly.

The Amazon has been razed to the ground

And its timber erected into rostrums.

The sun has been dismantled

And its fire stored in gargantuan ovens.

The ices of the Poles carefully pickaxed

And melted into drinking water.

The stomach of the whales has been ripped open.

Nothing more than the incredible has been found.

But he, or she, has chosen exile.

*

Res in medias for a purpose.

Reading in-between the lines

Is no longer sufficient.

Before and After must be ascertained,

Imagined, put into eye-perspective.

Without this educated guess in our lives

Maps will forever be unreadable.

 

Quote (thanks to Marilyn)

"The mystery of Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."

Usually attributed to Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), but untraceable. Found in Conquest of Illusion (1928) by J.J. Van Der Leeuw, pp. 11 and 89.

Funny thing is, Kierkegaard was a Protestant theologian and writer, Van Der Leeuw was a Liberal Catholic Church priest and writer. To attribute the quote to the former while it is the latter who in all probability wrote it is one of those delicacies Irony sends us sometimes. The main problem lies in the exegesis, whichever Church one belongs to.

So long as they are just bandying words at each other and not brandishing swords, I'm fine.

All things considered, Kierkegaard may well have said it.

Quote bis repetitae

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. -Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)

Quote

 
"Man versteht nur , was man auch seiner Großmutter erklären könne."

"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your
grandmother."

"Nous ne comprenons que ce que nous pouvons aussi expliquer à notre grand-mère."

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) 

Near-Life Experience

Yesterday I died. Stupid car accident.

I was driving home late in the tired night,

And all of a sudden lurches this...rodent.

– Both he and I saw the Tunnel, and the Light.

The apple tree around which my Volvo coiled

Stood its ground and sent me spinning in the dark,

My flight the headlights like fireworks tailed,

Glass and metal etching my body like birthmarks.

Pronounced rightfully dead on the tragic scene

I was sent to join the other daily, cold sleepers.

Next morning all I know was the scalpel biting my skin

Pulled me out of death a bit bonkers.

Then I did what everybody would have done:

I fled. I fled to catch up with my life –

I ran to rejoice with my parents and my wife,

I wanted to hug her and tell her I was ready for a son.

I found her in bed with my dad.

My mum had drained all my accounts.

Overnight I lost everything I had.

All my friends' numbers lead to busy sounds.

So I did what you'd do were you in my shoes:

My favourite clothes on my back I hit the road,

drove all the way down until no more could I cruise –

There the only thing left to do was to carouse,

There doze, there shag, there brag, there drowse

Until my complexion became that of a toad.

The entire continent I strutted like a bohemian

In a comatose state, half-baked in dreams,

For months, until a doctor said my absinthian

Ways would my life in the coming week claim.

All I did was on the whole very simple:

I went back to my house and burnt it to rubble –

Cooking the two cuckoos in the process – bled my mum white –

Then I drove to the cliffs of C__ overlooking the ocean,

Had my last sandwich, took the last picture of the last ray of light,

Then toppled all this, the car and me down to oblivion.

 

Hiatus

Le gouffre du monde s’effilochant en fils

Si fins que sa vaste béance ne s’affile

Que siècle après siècle, filin après filin,

Scalpelant au fur les mystères aquilins,

Ne laissant à l’obscur su du vide spectral

Que l’empreinte d’un mot qui n’a plus de rival.

 

Manu Trepalium

Les ongles soudain trop longs trop ronds devenus

De ne pas avoir à gratter la terre nue ;

Les ongles endurcis par l’inactivité,

Les doigts toujours tendus vers la réalité.

Les ongles soudain trop fins trop blancs devenus

De ne pas avoir à bêcher la terre nue ;

Les rognures affinés par l’inactivité.

Les ongles incassés aux noirs rebords râpeux

Des sombres congères de la réalité.

Les ongles diaphanes parce que l’on ne peut.

De tels ongles à mesure que l’homme se fait vieux

Sont-ils à trouver sur les mains lestes de Dieu.