Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action:Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners:Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one’s church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them- with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn’t matter in the least- with the same intensity in the thicket of one’s soul-pure if insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: Dada, Dada, Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE

That is all I have to say.
For now.

Sat, May 29 2010

Ces circonstances sont alors une sorte d’une révélation?
Si la grande âme doit souffrer toute sa vie à cause de cette douleur inhérente, peut-être la petite se trouve mieux de tomber dans l’oubli…….

The timeline exists even now; I will die one day in the distant future. But the hope that I have still a few decades left to live, to make a difference if you will, allows me to sleep tonight without the guilt that I am wasting time in slumber. Perhaps I would fall asleep anyway, regardless of whether I knew I would die tomorrow. I have always felt that sleep is a waste of time though, so the imminence of death might trigger the compulsion to stay awake and be productive. Productive doing what, I wonder. Have I any ongoing and important enough projects in life that need attention before the moments when I cease to exist? I feel that I may in fact blink away most days without giving significant life projects a second thought. How about that – my life as a vegetable.

This is not true. It cannot be true. I do have ambitions and lots of it. They just have not been solidified yet. They are in their blueprint stage, and with some architectural insight will soon become monuments in my grand scheme of a fairytale. Yes, someday my prince will come and yes, I will have waited long enough for his arrival to have figured out my own person. I just realised that I haven’t been crossing off the dates on my calendar all summer. The calendar is hanging on the wall, stuck in July. The dates flew by as I lived out days like clockwork; weekdays were spent in the office and weekends were spent engaging in fervent hedonism. Life is short after all. So instead of reading a good book as my mother would have suggested, I hung out with friends and engaged in long conversations with them, ate good food with them, laughed with them, drank with them, walked with them. Now I don’t see anything wrong with the way I spent my summer nights; there isn’t a single thing I would have changed, not in the least bit.

Apparently loneliness is good fuel for productivity. Perhaps it is true that being immersed in a romantic affair would have one lying in bed all day and consequentially neglecting life’s responsibilities of hard work and rational thinking. How long can a person be lonely before the seams of his soul begin to crack and the holes leak the essence of his happiness down the sidewalk of devastation? I always have believed that true artists need to suffer in order to produce a masterpiece. We naturally reflect upon our lives more when in the depths of sorrow, anguish, disappointment, guilt. Happiness on the other hand does not find one brooding in the same manner. When you are utterly happy, smiling for no apparent reason, chances are you are not questioning it or yourself about those feelings of contentment. Lovers are foolish because their minds are intoxicated with endorphins. Oblivion is bliss I guess. So it appears everyone seeks bliss as everyone wants to fall in love or be in love.

It is ironic that talk of death leads to talk of life, and life as a topic invites a discussion of love. But what do I really know about love or life or death? As much as I feel as though I am old, I must admit I am still quite young. I meet someone every day who has more knowledge than I do about things that I feel passionate about. I get up every morning, take a shower and get dressed even though all my life I have felt that life is in many ways a pointless venture. Was I born a nihilist? This is why I have tried hard all summer to enjoy living without attaching to it the notion that nothing matters in the end. I need to work on being grateful for each morning that I wake up to find I have been given a whole new day to explore myself and others. Sleep is indeed a waste of time if overdone, but it is also a refuge from reality and for that I am also grateful. And on that note, I believe it is time to go to bed. What better way to fall asleep than to the sound of rain splattering outside, in the city that never sleeps.

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Rilke

Today I’m reading poems as usual and posted a few for the sake of typing them out. I find it quite satisfying, the effort of typing up a good poem. And in that vein of thought, here is another which has fast joined the ranks of my favourite poems.

Pathways

Understand, I’ll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I’ll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Also I realise that I am just barely squeezing in a few posts for July at its cusp. August will be a more prolific month, I promise.

wholly to be a fool
while spring is in the world

my blood approves
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelid’s flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis.

ee

it will become you; and if you are glad
whatever’s living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man’s
flesh put space on; and his mind take off time

that you should ever think, may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies, the foetal grave
called progress, and negation’s dead undoom.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

ee