The only dangerous thing in the world is eye contact. It can kill someone on the spot or simply set them to smolder until later, when and where, far apart in time and distance, the fire burns out a small piece of their life. This piece hurts to lose, but hurts more to carry.
I’m afraid to write anything forthright. Do I have what it takes ot keep these sparks contained? Do I want to contain them? Can there ever be a right time and place? Even the fate of this notebook may parallel. Every page consumed in burning, and then lit ablaze, its ashes of passion swept into the wind.
What do we wait for in the silent moments. What are we wishing for? Or hoping to never hear? There is an eternity in things. Glances, lips, moments held for longer than they last, fingertips and decisions that remain undecided until they fade. Even the pauses between these lines contain more of my life than a month of living. And the waiting is the best part. It contains everything that the world cannot contain. The imagined life is infinitely richer, but only the first the steps toward realization, the act of becoming, the exhumation and exhibition of one’s desires can give meaning to a dreamed reality. Tormented by nebulous desires.
“My feet were tied with a silken thread of my own hands weaving.”
I won’t fill this with too many petty aphorisms, but I couldn’t help this one. I have no questions to ask – only time to wait. Ease is the way of perfection, letting fall. I don’t want to turn these thoughts outward, only inward, deeper, to find words that can give substance to feeling, solace. Solace from what? Guilt? Contradiction? One must be comfortable with themselves before they can be comfortable with others. A truce must be declared between the present hour and the irresistible, disastrous future.
Fernando Pessoa wrote about three levels of pain: the intellectual, emotional, and physical. I think there is one more, the unconscious. Each anguish finds expression in the level below it. Intellectual knowledge of a loved one who is hurt far away makes you emotionally sad. And sadness makes you weep. A linear progression. However, unconscious anguish must also find an expression, and this may be melancholia. I feel the causes of unconscious anguish are always socio-cultural, interpersonal. Society both creates expectations and frustrates them, leaving us with needs we don’t really need, which are out of reach of intellectual resolution. This is why I feel so serene in the wilderness. I search for the feeling of forlornness. This word is the closest I have to describe the absence of need, or need for the lack of need, a positive emotion. Positive not due to fulfillment, but to the creation of the lack of needing to be fulfilled. It accompanies other emotions- solemnity, solitude. Loneliness is an artifact of misdirection. Turning the internal light outward where its purpose is to illuminate the personal truth we hold inside.
Finding truth with someone else is a terribly difficult task – to move beyond games of manipulation, power, control, seduction. Which all parties enjoy, however banal the results. The easier task is to turn away and seek a different truth, one that requires less effort but more will.
“I wandered all these years among a world of women, seeking you.”
What a development. I’ve begun to make plans with you in them; complex convoluted, uncertain, but they’re centered around you. Maybe it’s time to make sacrifices in life. Maybe it’s time to live for someone, and something, other than myself. And maybe, by some crafty slight of hand, I can make it all work. I’m not worried – only eagerly looking forward to what comes next. Who’s writing this novel?
The extent of our personalities, ourselves, our inner world, is defined by two things – what we know (from what we remember) and what we imagine. Both are nebulous, because the scope, criteria, extend of the concepts of knowledge, the limits of definitions and their applicability and context, are dependent upon our ability to imagine their potential. With a deep passion and vast imagination, coupled with optimistic outlook, a personality takes on a boundless depth and scope. And this is what I fall in love with. You become the world. You embody more of what potential life has to offer. And the more life one has within themselves, the less human they are and the more divine they become. We all strive for the perfection in divinity, even if it’s in the aesthetic rather than the religious. To fall in love is, of course, a burden.
To sacrifice freedom for romance is maybe the unspoken goal of those souls which recognize the need for truth which encompasses more than the blank mineral nothingness embodied by the natural world, even if this is where all axiomic truths must stem from.
What is the value of humanity? It lies in slowing down. To defer judgement, decisions, assumptions, and opinions allows you to understand a more nuanced version of the reality you share with those around you. And this is only important if you have ascribed to yourself the futile endeavor of seeking truth. With out this impossible goal to guide your decisions, you are free to lay waste to everybody and everything you encounter which stands in your way in seeking all the ephemeral pleasures life has to offer. And so life is contradiction- we set goals we can’t achieve, for reasons we cannot comprehend, seek them in ways we can’t justify, all in an attempt to understand ourselves, who don’t exist. But recognizing this and seeking a path forward anyway is better than blindly striving ahead. It imbues a body with a sublime sense of mystery and the satisfaction of the ubiquitous human curiosity which only can be satisfied through probing its own depths.
What comes next? The only wrong decision may be to not decide. What to sacrifice and for what cause? There is latent pleasure in waiting. Maybe even a pleasure greater than anything real, as it is infinite in its potential, and the less concrete its imagination, the more boundless its magnitude. Yet time will press down and the weight of it will force out of my vacillation the first steps in a hitherto unknown direction. And a year from now I’ll write identical words to these and ponder where the next chapter leads.
kalvin dot life 