29/07/26

There came a point where I could no longer see the images behind words.

The peculiarity of the book is that it often serves as a mere temporary halt for the reader, before their destination can be reached. The very premises of the successful imparting of literature are paradoxically the first obstacles readers typically encounter: From the font, the blanks that form the paragraphs, the feel of the pages or the size of the letters, the book's only quality seemingly consists of getting superceded by the work, as painlessly as possible.

The book, or in some cases the screen's qualities thus appear inherently negative, as while the degree to which they hinder the reading scales downwards, the logical extreme of the adequate book is nihility. The ideal of a direct transmission of meanings, unfettered by the complications brought by matter itself.

To what end ? Which sky does the enamored with words yearn to contemplate with the stifling of the lake's ripples ? Precisely, if those ripples are naught but imperfections, and following that they remain still contingent properties of wind-caressed water, that imperfection would thus transfer to the entire lake at large: That which fulfills itself in void would be most perfect if it never had come to exist in the first place, the book seemingly pursuing its vanishing. In youth, it seemed as though I was slowly, in muffled agony, seized upwards by an ontological spiral, by a proclaimed superiority of the story upon the very words that conveyed it.

Yet, there always seemed to remain an irrepressible longing within, one that deafened me to the story's draw, the nostalgia of a barely beating memory: The more I learned about the intricacies of narratives, the more the webs of intrigue, even for the most carefully sewn ones, gradually frayed and loosened their hold. It was as if I had been caught a pupa, and once the chrysalis unraveled, the new heights my winged indifference allowed me to reach gave way to disdain.

How frail and arrogant it all seemed from up there. Stories about the self, the world or time's wonders, be it heartfelt coming-of-age or inspiring epics, had now lost the luster they seemed to possess for countless others. Having grown dispassionnate of the very building blocks of stories, however tall their spires reached, they now blended with each other: Like a skyline in a blackout, the myriad lights had gone dark, leaving nothing but looming, ill-defined shapes.

Perhaps I simply did not want to let these sensations go, and to treasure them deeply. That which laid beyond meaning, or rather below it: The way that pages breath and sigh, the welcoming bulkiness of covers that espouse one's hands, the shared heresy of a prayer. And what to say of the subtle curvature of letters, their burgeoning discerned only by the loving gaze ? Or of the certainty of a chapter's steel, the way they cut and shape the borders of untread land ? While truthfully the presence of the book, by the grace of our imperfections never truly vanishes, I could not stand for it to be reduced to an afterimage: Some blurry perception encroaching the vision of a reader lost in the stories's vagaries, mere technical settings to set it into focus. Rejecting such a mechanical conception of the book as a transmitter, more importantly for me than anything, was what made phonemes regain their vivid colors.

With a love colored in hate, the vapid crystallization of words began to pale in contrast to the esthetics of their destruction. Prosody was to me the study of dying stars, the contemplation of fireworks as they lacerate and bloom: It is to save from incineration the remnants of words set alight for the story's pyre, to be as the passerby in a graveyard, stirred to mutism by flowery graves.

Perhaps it was due to such tenderness for the departed that I grew wary of the sights of life. I needed to see no longer. So I gouged out my eyes. I would not be drawn to the sky, for below the quicksand once equated with death, I had fallen into the embrace of cavernous depths. How deep, and how dark they are. I would wander them in grafted silence, groping through the obscurity, sculpted a thousandfold by gifted scars. Indeed, does the story not reach beyond the vellum ? The perception of the self was always mired in narration, the only life that psyche can sustain is one that is made fiction.

For who could bear the weight of a life made of discontinuous events ? A healthy perception of oneself has been considered by most to be one where the daily contingencies are not merely aggregated, but united in a singular thread. Though there may be knots, upon unravelling it should remain singular, the past becoming future's foundation. Tiredness is caused by faulty sleep, the gilded life was paved by efforts of a continued obssession, shyness a result of encounters too few, so on and so forth. The banal story of the self has weaved countless narrative arcs for our sanity, gradually crafting a definition of our own character.

There certainly came a sort of relief upon me. As being bereft of vision did blind me to the melodramatic nature of the self: Pathos' usual eloquence would appear to me as but mawkish drivel, for questions of who was I, or if the me of yesteryear was the same me as today were already answered: I was condemned to be myself. The same as I ever was, I would always be, a heart unchanging. Personality outside of its own fiction revealed itself as a paltry garment for a most diaphenous psyche, days collected as a volume of aphorisms. Like a threadless pearl necklace, what halted the descent from still bearable paradoxes to deadly contradictions was that very necklace. I existed in name only.

I remember how, when I first began to read La Recherche, I was not able to part with an underlying sense of emptiness that acccompanied its discovery. I felt as if perhaps I had been reading it improperly, as hour after hour, I would trudge through the work, the very grammar muddying where sentences began and end, origamis of punctuation making me stumble at every step, and I would backtrack endlessly to the safety of capital letters, to attempt to find my way once more. However, when I asked my professor about the matter, he simply replied that I was doing perfectly fine. Proust, he said, was to him one whose style aimed to boil meaning, until it eventually evaporated.

I understood it then. Of what remained in sublimation. Even if the depths of my own heart could no longer be peered into, I could hear its beating, still. These words deprived of images, these pitch-black symbols on a white canavs yet remained. And for such pure vocal expression of the unseen, is there not a simpler word ? Pray tell, these words of mine, could they become song ?

Proust was more of a composer than a writer. In that sense, it was then where I began to long for such scores hidden in writing. In the dense maze of pages, every page turned was accompanied by a frisson only withdrawal could provide, a motionless heart inebriated by hope for newfound tremors. Perhaps there were multiple types of readers: The ones that seeked to magnify, to expand the breadth of their life through writing in a glee of discovery and on the other end, those that wished to be consumed. The ones that began to doubt the fundamental rule that words communicated. Expression. In Adam Smith's rare writings on art, that is how he defined music, in opposition to other mimetic mediums.

Words never appeared quite the same after that. To love them meant to be orphaned from the world, the price of poetry revealing itself as the metaphorical parricide of its authors. A friend has a nice fricative feel to it, with sounds lowering in subtle tragedy in its conclusion, refreshing, overbearing yet. Love has a nearly feline presence, contorting despite its shortness, like nestling in pillows. But of their meanings, I could not speak. The world had gone beautiful. Lonelier too.

To the antinomy of a fragmented life, I responded with smiling indifference. Perhaps in the story's end, I had come to regard my life as equally fictitious as the ones I would read about. Weren't we made of the same substance, after all ?

So I must read and I must write, the paragraphs excoriating this very page a reminder of what must yet be achieved: To cultivate the polysemy of language not for its own sake, but rather to overload it in such exuberance that intelligibility may be cleanly excised from it. To drown the sea in an ocean, to fervently pray for the waves to engulf the canopy of heaven. When the myriad threads linking even the most antithetic of terms will be weaved, the knots of the similes will level themselves from mountains to plains, clean as silk.

Then, with words and imagination barren, even if I can shed tears no longer, even if I can laugh no longer, even if my lips are to be cursed to be naught but a bloated scar, then still, let my voice resound. Far below the surface, be it threnody or scherzo, in the dark I will hold myself close to my heart, guided by the echo of a melody only I can hear. So that I can feel the weight of life on my shoulders. To feel the agonies of death and rebirth. To feel. To feel. O world, let me feel once more.

And to you, dear traveler, when the time comes for my words to cease...

Would you come take a listen ?

16/05/25

-"Unwithering flowers bloom violently."

Time has its favourites. As neighbouring the perpetually crowded streets of past and future, the present is but a dilapidated, vacant home. For none has ever dwelled in it. And if by dessicated theatrics, a guest was to wander in its halls, I would fervently pray for their departure post-haste. Yet through of all of its modern acclaim, from the desperate shouts of the self-help vultures to the platitudes of the well-meaning still self-serving pal turned improvised friend, the present has been hailed as the great panacea of our post-modern ailments.

As though the fruits of life were simply ripe for the taking, and one should simply wait under the shade of the leaves, breeze revigorating, for the apple to fall in the palm of your hands. To focus on the moment, to savour the now. Akin to the vagaries that sleeps brings, in a pastiche of Baudelaire I often thought that, without the saving graces of ignorance, to dwell in the present would require bravery not unlike madness.

For where does present reside ? You tell me it lies in the span of a breath, sharply inhaled deeply exhaled, a momentary rest: To adjust tightly the memories on your shoulders, to close your eyes. However, a span ? Closing your eyes has a beginning and a end, however short. If defined in this manner, the present would equate the now, it would make it unchanging. For the now to be singular, the very word lasting long enough to betray itself, it would need to be fixed. Stopped. And so the main divison of time, the existent between what has existed and what has yet to exist, would lie outside of it ? The thread of change, the changeless ?

Time as a sucession of immobile events, a succession of stillframes. It does not take long then to ask what is between the stillframes, which would require then more of them in between, bound to the same rules, infinitely regressing in perpetual divison. Ontologically speaking, it's contradiction, but psychologically however, still, it is required. Narrativized time, perhaps one enthralling aspect of the novel is that its temporality is closest to what the mind needs to keep itself sane.

And in the weaving of words they are indeed singular units of a singular flow. The character is happy. Suddenly it is sad, instantly switching when a word supercedes another. Then, one quick look at one's consciousness, would fail to pinpoint the moment of change. A posteriori, perhaps, without memory sewing it, the threads coils on themselves. You do not switch from "happy" to "sad", you gradually change from one to another, even then, not in a simple streamlined fashion, the vast expanse shifting and turning, as evidently there is never a moment when perception comes to a halt. It could be said that changes cannot be felt, only its entire process. The very whole of it, knowing nor the source nor the end, the flow unending from the river to the sea.

Thus focusing on the present is naught but a collage of our memory's remnants and the chimeras of anticipation, and on psyche's canvas is splattered a pointilist assemblage of faded colors. But however crude it can be, it is fixed, ready to be consumed: For intelligible abstractions of long-gone events or future contigencies can hardly be called objects of desire, and this artifical "now" remains the frail veil guarding consciousness from the protean throes of formlessnes, bubbling rancidly in the obscure reaches. As in the breeding ground of birth and decay, in putrescent embrace, the present verily dwells. It foams and it laughs. That incestuous child of time.

Where does it begin and where do I end, I know no longer. Quoting Wittgenstein from memory, if eternity was to be understood not as the pepertual duration, but atemporality, then living in the present could be thus called immortality. A being out of time. Picture a room filled with air, if you will: In this room, air could be said to be everywhere, existing in the entierety of the available space at once. Now where could you find air in this room ? You can say that there is air in the room, but you cannot say that it is "here" or "there", it would only be half-exact. "There" would contain only a miniscule fraction of the whole. The same would then go for every area you could point to, and if you were to go over every possibility, it wouldn't be there. It cannot be found. To be everywhere is to be in no "where".

If one could, akin to air, fill all of time's crevices and chasms, then, the same effect would follow: You cannot change, for you are change itself. Verily, this is the conclusion that was meant to be found.

So why ? Why is it that I cannot find you ? Oh, lone daughter of the summer triangle, where does your warmth end ? I cannot cross myself for I remain yet a border of your whole, fated to delineate ourselves. The world, perceived as one, sub specie aeterni. Yes, I still do long for blasphemy. My once cloud-scarring gaze turned inwards, I impale within myself the sky within the sky within myself so in grafted silence, I may reach an end. I know it cannot be told. But I can show it:

You are staring at the minute hand. There is one second remaining until there are fifty-nine seconds remaining for the first minute of the first hour.

Thinking about this second that is to come you are interrupted by the echo of that very thought: it fractures itself into a different sensation, one for each available sensory organ and even the ones you were not yet aware of, multiplied by each word of that sentence you just previously incarnated - sensations are rooting themselves for every petal of that flower you saw - their branches coursing through you, flesh becoming ripe.

You feel heavy. Your mind is an overgrowth of self-devouring regression thinking about thinking about thinking, you want to scream. The very first drop of the scream cancels itself. You are overloading yourself, full of yourself, hyperreflexive the walls are transparent enough for you to see your reflection. The endless regurgitation of the ego, you vomit yourself onto the floor you spill everywhere. The soil is warm as you seep into it, gaining awareness you are part of the countless substratas, or rather, you were never anything else. You have been born right this instant and you were born right the folowing instant also.

Every perceivable point in time - that is all of them, and they grow endless - you are reborn and swiftly executed and reborn in the next. You have no memories of the previous ones, you have no memory, you are too busy perceiving to remember. The seasons unfurl within you, your mind melts into your body-in-the-soil that is really just the earth rather the world now. You are the world. You witness your own impossibly short entropy-induced heat death. The resulting energy concentrated in your ego overflows into infinite exuberant creation of stars, lacerating the engulfing void. Your thoughts are orbiting on themselves, myriad macrocosms of self-indulging soliloquies.

Meanwhile, you were sitting in the train station on the second bench from the entrance. You see a thousand summers exploding across the horizon. Finally, the qualia of omnipresence pierces your very being. You cannot cover your ears. The shrill sound manages to break the psychosomatic limits of your body, and your senses are extinguished one by one. The whole of your everywhere coalesces into a singular, overpowering, thumping sound. You die as you hear your heartbeat.

When you come to your senses, you are staring at the minute hand. There is one second remaining until there are fifty-eight seconds remaining for the first minute of the first hour.

Herein ends nonsense.

After experiencing and fittingly subsequently forgetting my aproximate thousands of deaths, I recalled the image of immortality in the internal alchemy doctrines. The practicioner, in the final stage of its training, the lien-hsü-ho-Tao, cultivates the Void to return to the Tao, acheiving immortality by merging once again with the undifferentiated energy of the Tao. It made me nauseous, that I had once achieved in a time unknown their lifelong goal. Call it immortality, formlessness or the present, I realized I wished to stray from it. And slowly, inevitably, a wish began to quietly develop. This heart of mine, beating to the purity of the present, please, let me stifle it. Thus, oathtaker, I impart here my resolution:

I will be stained with you.

28/02/25

-"That’s what a gaze is. Attention. An invisible string that connects us. Sole focus."

It must have been around my 11th birthday. Or my 10th. It was around that time when I met myself for the first time. There was the kind lady that always seemd to hang out near me, the butcher that only casted side-glances at me - as he was preoccupied with packaging meat for us when we went to the friday weekly market - and now also a tiny piece of everything huddled near the boxes, breathing quietly. There are lots and lots of people around me, and then there's I. Going through the events in my life, feels like flipping through the pages of a picture book.

Everyday, although I am no longer in school, reading it remains one of my main assignments, and ever-so diligently I must interpret it, very carefully, and the feelings in me, they whisper and plead, so that I favor one over another, but I know all of them are liars. Still, although there are no teachers and bad grades anymore, I must choose one, otherwise when I wake up again it will be very late in the day, and I prefer to be a morning person when I can. And so, among the soft cries, the gentle sounds indifference makes when lapped up from spilled inertia or the hateful whimpers of some now abstract trauma, using a sort of knockoff nitzschean reasoning, I would always, always choose the most practical. Might as well make it useful, I thought.

As to not mindlessly descend in some pathos-laden tapestry of pretty yet hollow words, as I am accustomed to - and to which this very sentence particaptes in, self-hatred being as cyclical as always - let me share here a distinction that I've come across in my studies. That is, of the perception in 1st person and of the perception in 3rd person. If the air surrounding you would, at this very instant, grow colder, how would you experience it ? Would you, after noticing slight shivers running through your spine, deduce that you are feeling cold ? No. You would simply think, or say, "I'm cold".

I do not have such luxury of a direct access to qualia, I can look around my room, and around the objects I perceive, my body, my thoughts and my will I would include, and with no more reverence than how I consider the sparse trinkets that it holds. That is to say, under certain definitions of consciousness, I would fail to qualify as one. Leaving behind the consistency of my self, whether it would be ash or snow, I hold it in no particular regard, even if someday I were to melt gently at sunrise.

Still I remain here. Writing in a language that is not my own. Learning about yet another slew of phatic acronyms, grammar distorded for utility's sake, and of these words making images. Perhaps it is to rewrite them. To rewrite the borders and the margins and the padding, the endless space between you and me. Why here, why this place ? My breathing goes short. My fingers tremble ever so slightly the sounds of the keys grows ever-more sonorous, in psyche I turn around a corner I crumble on the pavement... And it is neither cold nor coarse, it is warm. The warmth of the faint traces of the footsteps of perhaps the junior ballet that shared the room with us, the pearly black laminated floor. Right. In my heart I am still on stage. Expanding endlessly, coating irreverently the humid soil on these days of pouring rain, and the yawning sea that I seldom see, however close to our home it may be.

Ah, If I am to fated to play a role then please, let me choose it. Worry not, I have thought of everything, not too perfect, not too flawed just the way it should be. She will be kind to a fault, sometimes childish, sometimes a bit dispassionate oh but deeply determined a quiet storm brewing, never quite spilling out, perhaps rare moments where it would seep, her eyes pleading for some comfort. Maybe even a bit of a klutz although she wouldn't think of herself that way. Quite anxious also, never quite blooming but if she ever feels comfortable, her normally wary and cautious heart would disspipate so. That makes her sound quite needy but still I really believe that she would be a very lovely person. Truly. And she will be the happiest girl in the whole wide world.

Thus, bereft of the sky I stood under, beyond language, there remains nothing but to encompasss it all, the rising and waning of the tides, the world turned from syllable to sound: All of me that was not heard as a rustle or a rumble, will be said in one word, arbitrary, meaningless, a word for me to fill, for me to make, for me to be.

Simply said, I have thought of a name. Esia sounds nice.