I Am Here
The length of the long night: a ball formed by winding a tape measure around itself. From one of its markings, the number inscribes me clearly.
What wraps around me is the sensation of silence, soft and viscous, forming the sticky tide that turns the world, devouring my sensitivity to light almost tenderly. In the hours of deep night, I have nothing. I have no pain, no hope, no anything. I rise and fall with the tide, and I am also a part of it.
In This World, Your Mind
Order and learning float above the world, no different from those stale, self-assured discourses. The desire to probe the Real provokes divine mockery. Understanding never exists, like the universe in the film The Great Buddha+.
You mean to cut people apart ruthlessly, to disassemble and classify human bodies and minds into identifiable pieces. You are doing a bloody thing, administering a vial of medicine that withers the beating part of the living. The question I pose to you is a protest against the erasure of Dasein, but I myself don’t know when I have truly existed, or have existed.
Syndromes
That hollowed-out portion is the drug that media has been injecting into people’s minds, drop by drop; its side effects produce psychosis.
“But some things are beautiful precisely because they are broken / The world of the internet is like this, girls are like this, words are like this too” (Nyara, NEEDY GIRL OVERDOSE). When you turn your gaze toward mono no aware, that miraculous ordinary coincidence, that effort-process which has perished, that which went unnoticed and hidden, that which was noticed and exposed, suddenly everything with color fills with beautiful illusions running parallel to breaking.
To See Is to Know
Structure, death, and theology: bones, scarred calcium deposits. Invisible protrusions and the semblance of hardness.
Vallejo’s bones: “Pale and mournful bones, whistles, whistles.” “Above the gray spider of your skeleton, / another giant hand wrought of light holds up / a blue heart-shaped bullet.” “His witnesses include / Thursday, the elbow bone, / solitude, rain, and the road…”
Miyazawa Kenji’s bones: “Let the skin be ground down by humus and soil / the bones tempered in cold carbonic acid.” “Wind… bones, pallid blue, / a bell rings softly somewhere.”
Tranströmer’s bones: “The blackbird played his song on a dead man’s bone / we stood under a tree, feeling time sink, sink.” “It is four in the morning / the scraped-bare bones of life / making cold social calls.”
My bones: “Project my ribs, cast in stardust, / into the sentences of gods. / Run. From one end of the century, tumble toward / the edge of the pond. Pistol, / bayonet, and lighthouse: that is / a mature adult, that / is a rainy-day angel aria trembling / between strings and death.”
Cioran’s Guidance
The world for Cioran is the most profound thing: it cruelly screws itself into his sensitive brain marrow. Cioran inscribes the insomniac’s wakefulness into his mocking wail: Exercises of Negation, A Summary of Decomposition, On the Heights of Despair, The Twilight of Thought, A Handbook of the Possessed, The Temptation to Exist, Tears and Saints, Confessions and Exile. Running parallel to his suffering is his poetic, fragmentary philosophizing, seemingly composed of sensory cells, yet his honesty with negative language gives his vengeful thought a terrifying force of detonation. Jehovah wrote the will of God, replacing the appearance of the world with divine radiance, while Cioran tears open the illusion of the world, cursing all things with endless fragmentation, restoring them. Ruin, shadow, disenchantment, fall, prayer, solitude, doubt, deficiency, insomnia: Cioran’s flames compose a grand procession, enough to burn the vestments of God.
Kunicki: Water (1)
I woke from a muddy morning. The gray light on the windowsill bound me to the bottom of the mattress like a spider’s web. Breathing sluggishly, I walked out the door on hazy legs. Outside the door lay a dying fish, coated in the sticky juices of its own innards, trembling emptily and with difficulty. I pulled today’s clouds from its mouth, and it thrust its fish bone spitefully at my throat.
And so a line of poetry, written in black blood, appeared at my throat, staining my clothes for the day. I lost excitement and acquired dryness. A dream burst through the space before my eyes, brandishing a soft club. I now live in a double reverie.
I saw Kunicki in the distance. He seemed to be in a daze. I couldn’t make out his face; I only knew he must have encountered something to become this melancholy. Water, like the connection between us, splashed and broke apart, and on its cross-section floated the remains of my day.