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 it's 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 is 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 is 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.