Cassandra from the rain
‘And better to sit alone on one’s mountain like a black half-destroyed fortress, pensive and silent enough; such that the birds themselves are afraid of this silence.’
– Nietzsche
The realm of action identifies itself by insistence, it is inadmissible to do nothing, there is a totality that needs to be satisfied, to ensure that one clings to things as if our health and sanity depend upon it. This persistent drone of the need to do things cannot rest content with doing nothing, being nothing, it looks to the future to fulfil something it is not right now, by laying down more work. It is a zone that boycotts simple being, it lauds becoming, only begrudgingly allowing sleep to escape its clutches for a while, and then only to hammer one into doing the moment one wakes, those with organised work to attend threatened into transport networks with the sleep still in their eyes all but for a splash of cold water. But even those who have escaped that imposition are attacked by the harpies of doing as they sit around drinking a cup of tea, you’ve had your rest, now there is the work of the day to do, even if it is something constructed for oneself, projects to work on, something is earthing one up out of the ground to get down to it, it can no longer not matter as one knew nothing of it in sleep, it seems one rejoins the legacy of the accumulated days, the weeks, the months, the years. To do nothing properly requires a special kind of talent the traipse of becoming insists you do not have. In one’s better moments perhaps one appreciates being so driven, particularly when there is no belief in it, it is its own kind of not doing in as much as one does not need to do anything to be so driven. One can simply let it wash over one and join it any time one likes, doing and yet there is something of not doing about it too, like floating down a river going where the river wants to go, something is being done but there is no-one doing it, one thing leads to the next, and yet they are only temporary ideas of things, stop a moment to examine them and there’s nothing there. It is just a miraculous flow, once one has rid oneself of the obsessive need to achieve, which is usually how one spends one’s time out of the flow, a stranger to it, a mania of accumulation, more, more, wanting to notice the pile grow higher, missing that the greatest accumulation forms by a passing through, as if handing on as soon as one comes into it, a flowing on, only later noticing something has been built, as if one had no idea of it. It was truly building itself through your labour hardly impacting, glancing off, indistinguishable from doing nothing, almost as if it is doing nothing that is doing too much, because too in the mind all the time, the need to do nothing a work of conscious focus, the creation of a self to ensure it, the alienation of the continual drawing away to engage in action, forgetting a better doing nothing one is hardly aware of, unable to distinguish between doing and not doing, less a mania of the abandoned, the passport checks of realms, the forced renunciation of what is easier renounced not even thinking of it. The gesture of history imposes its rest before battle, but in the absence of time it is a tranquillity, as if we were long ago cut off from our condition, even if it was only a moment before. History is a foregone world of puppets acting out their jerky tugs and pulls, nothing to which we owe allegiance there. Let them have their fanaticism, their vague suspicions, you have abdicated yourself of their world, only visiting to snip the strings of any who will listen, though few do. Your testimony, conceived in exile, is beyond their dimension and cannot be divulged save in the clandestine half-light of other hopes, a drip-fed emanation of the battle won and the victory secured. Fragmented necessarily or the very word will be crushed under the pressure of the deep, this testimony like postulates of the gods without stone to chisel it into, a fatal kindness voraciously consuming an exasperated abstinence, the sage in rage, talents reviled in secret, the suffering city that pities the general who must lay siege to it and take it, knowing him to be the envoy they have hoped for in their wildest dreams and nightmares, the defeater of our chimeras and tormentor of our mediocrity, the model of redemption we dare not admit who shines with the miracle or some terrible crime against humanity, out here it is hard to tell them apart, since who has not had too great an ambition to be fulfilled without significant bloodshed. At best it is a kind of music one listens to pretending it is not literal. Yet it would be nothing if the worst could be ruled out.
Glory is a kind of vanity, it needs a public. There is not much appetite for it in anonymity, it is just another of so many things eliminated. Its reflection there is a secret honour, tolerated if it answers questions, for all questions are still just the throes of chance miming doomed cries interrogating inactivity, little more than the habit of asking empty compared with the better vastness of subsiding back into the practice of quietude. It seems one must listen to these echoes with their demanding tone, the answer one has can hardly be bothered to pair up with its wilting question, it just seems an irrelevant noise clinging on to a lust to know, how unfamiliar these questions seem that were once all that concerned us. Or so we suppose, at any rate the strength has gone from them. And all the things one sought, fame, reputation, others to spend one’s time with, have gone the way of things one never wanted, money, career. Hard-won scruples have thrust their roots into his conscience, he would even renounce his name, be no-one. A drifter who never goes anywhere, a prayer without being said. Every intimation of his inner life divine, a shade of belief about the inaccessible. Scathing words for glory, yet not so far from it once the machinations he uses to hold aloof from it are put aside. An acceptance of sorts, and little need for recognition, at last.
Has he been evacuated from the land of forsaken genius, is he thanking his epoch for martyring itself? The obscurity fades away, we commiserate with the still living deprived by our departure, we thought ahead in every matter. We await our own realm, passing through by staying still, a command of our own serenity in the eclipsed world showering down darkness, entire lives without adequate light to assess the situation. A sickly freedom under the perpetual glare of faceless surveillance, as if constantly reproached for wanting better, for finding intolerable the increasingly everyday, colonised by demeaning media, no blows left to wield against something hostile and alien that has taken over, perverting every value that once mattered as if it were just the march of inevitable change and not a disgrace out in the open.
Our enthusiasm for the world pales. Reduced to a regret, genius venerated as an act of revenge, loving the deplorable denial torpedoed and sunk, the ocean of urgency, the sediment of a destroyer’s final resting place lifted up in admirable envy. The depressed tiger gorged on blood, going soft to be so surprised, the preening rebellion, his anonymous panting breathes, the capacity for exhaustion enlisted by time.
Metaphors in a frenzy to revivify a vulgar affectation. Poor memory instils a philosophy of forgetting, a strong conviction in concealment, more immediate a hatred of the system, an execution planned to leave no trace, if apathy plays a part it is aggression out of its depth, no vitality for the outrage yet stepping forward anyway as if one cannot abandon a lifelong perseverance of sluggish steps, the sheer villainy in mastering it, as if resigned to impotent tactics yet formidable as a beast, a madman, a vigilant iconoclast smashing every inspiration that makes it to a pedestal, proceeding without it, as if thinking over insults to reject every injury, a camouflaged conviction precipiced in perplexity, a poet of the pitiless inventing an enemy to take the brunt of it and despise his inferiority for him, vocal in the indignity in being attacked again and again, preserving a rancour for a better day, scraping out happiness like a thin film from the bottom of the barrel.
Living in the great contradiction, one is constantly looking for signs. Some type of placid reprisal with the luck of the devil, irreconcilable with the murky sham one is living, a discontent with being a sentry for a life better lived out of range a spewed venom for humanity that has lost its terms of engagement, as if war was supposed to flourish with such ferocity by the whim of despots and all the rest of us didn’t count. Some horror in society closing the gap upon our condition and soon there would never be anything else we knew as life, just vague memories of a lost dream. Exterminated like rodents in ruins, not even tolerated in abandoned structures on the verge of collapse, total victory being the destruction of all the children whose life has already been made a misery lest they grow up to resent it and turn up on the doorstep with their home-made vengeance, what fear quakes the almighty that they might get their just deserts to leave not even a quivering rat tail in the demolished society. What they have started they cannot even begin to end, on and on it will go, they do not even know how to tell when they have killed everyone who might strangle them in their beds in the future, they make more and more with every bloodbath, a sick human earthquake that does not know how to stop. Equilibrium leaves them to destroy themselves, wipe themselves out. Already they fear the inferno of reprisal from a dusty teddy bear in the rubble. The annihilating flame of repressed worldly anger that does not know how to say you have gone too far to expect to come out of it unscathed, as if it is gathering strength in the shadows to unleash it, to overthrow the violent arrogance with an inflicted ferocity of its own, explosive to tear apart the aggressor in a rapidly spreading chaos elegant in its divine fury excising the traitorous motherfuckers from the map of the world by the grace of God inflamed, equilibrium restored by a limited nuclear exchange that will be the end of it and the never again starting of it, and how can any of them say they didn’t expect it. Is the delirium of power so blind?
Deliriums spoil, trees are easy to conceive of. What luck of the devil spares us prayers. To silently pursue the absolute, one has to be alone. There is a harboured resentment but without object, as if it has dwindled and never been reinforced, its slinking away hardly noticed, only its emptiness remaining to remind of an old habit, to see that it has gone, like an angel overwhelmed by the solitude to which we pay homage. Ridiculous being an accomplishment stolen away, the gall of injustice. We sling ourselves at the feet of utter metamorphosis before we can possibly know what it is, what will emerge that has already emerged but not stable enough to guess at. Its nothingness is grace, its change an illusion, a furious claim of a self. The enthusiasm of an enemy abandoned before battle.
The corpse of the ‘I’ an image blur. A bedridden philosophy out of touch with the outdoors demands its payment in metaphysical gambles, our eyes become harsh to the world, unreleased from restriction and obsessively on a wild goose chase trying to transcend death with the stench of the memory of the body a taboo miasma. Replaced, and then not here at all, only ambiguous loss not yet ripened.
Truth never takes part in processions, rather it gradually takes possession of the lies and shames them and those who tell them. Truth is immortal, it can never be killed, only wounded for a time. In time it starts to disturb falsehood, those who have inoculated themselves with lies. Doubt is its ally, though it works for both sides it is a precision instrument in the hands of the truth, only a blunt delay appropriated by liars. Lies are shown to be so wretched once exposed that even the liars crave to see them vanish.
They take refuge in further lies and slander the truth from the shadows, but they know they are counting the days until their destruction, withdrawing only so as their collapse is not so humiliating, not because they are ready to admit their fault. But truth can make use of their pride to expose them further, skewering them in their retreat, holding them accountable for their lack of remorse, tempting the liars to fight back though all they can really do is repeat the lies as if they were reasonable and honest at the time, yet even at the time the truth was surrounding their position and readying its advance, so they cannot say they were not warned what was coming, but they only doubled down on the lies. Truth is its own strategic movement, it merely has to be spoken. If there is a best time to advance, it merely has to be spoken again, and again. Truth does not mind that it is not heard, because it knows in time it cannot fail to be heard. If it takes a long time, it can recruit resentment of the liars to its cause, building in punishment, though in itself the truth is only concerned with the truth, it leaves retribution to its own devices, advancing behind in its shadow, ready to emerge when the truth is established for all to see, though then it calls itself justice and takes the high ground, though certainly fuelled by the bitterness seething on the low ground, those who have been injured by the lies for whom no justice could ever be enough.
Loneliness, despair, a whirlwind you are thrown straight into without bothering with the void, depression takes away its clear light, instead absurdity reigns, into the vortex of disequilibrium. One can no longer sustain life but is forced to live it, for aeons it seems, spun into illusion, living long enough to survive, which is to say just another moment, and another, gasping for breath becoming just breathing, one breath after another, as if quite normal. The endless gesture going on living, roots in a balloon of air. You grow for all you cannot live beyond the boundary of it, too fragmentary a burst into life – like a bloom wilting at its moment of greatest beauty – to fully appreciate there are no boundaries left, you have reached the edge of the world in spent senses. You have no means left to sense there is no edge, you have fallen off. An explosion of sudden expansion without destruction, just far away from anything possible to imagine as one’s former position. At the edge of life – life. Mountains do not die. I disappear into the mist.
The petrification of wounds, the peripheral vision of madness, the stooping hawk in frame. Is it preferable to die with hopes? Or an inability to fathom the need for any gain?
Mourning life like a crime scene, we have eaten our fill of its tiresome parade. The degradation is truly impressive, all the easier to turn away from, welcoming only the things one has always welcomed, the breeze, the trees, the grass, the insects, the birds, simple sitting in a garden, wanting nothing to do with the rest of it.
In the rear guard of the damned, predestined to cultivate a cityscape demeanour, an out-of-date disaster proving the scales on the eyes. Why don’t we cease evading it, the furious carnage compounding its horror. Some complicated obsession lying in luxury, a burden camouflaged as an exhausted downward spiral.
A strange heresy, ruin. A serenity so long as no-one lives, breathing evils even a lunatic would feel tainted by.
The first centuries of the author, a claim of being a barbarian, yet writing, at a reduced scale, traipsing along into state-led wars, the banter of being the adversary, the deplorable art of weapons, not yet the philosophy as a new trait, wanting to learn what purpose anything serves, tired of stinking of triumph, that amounted to little more than fallen walls of once-great cities. I was quick in wanting to move on even then, though I had little inkling my martial bearing would be of any advantage in pure thinking, if you can call it thinking, that venomous spectacle of insipid imaginings. But I returned from life after life of nothing but conquest as if unfolding some nobler bearing lost in the mist of the ages, encountering now little more than conflict of unruly thoughts, a jester to history having good reason to be forgotten as new religions sprang up seeking a better version of me that just didn’t exist, save that I should revise myself, but not for them, those fools. I would rather be the loathsome spawn of endless wars, a wolfing down of bloody meat, unable to forget the soldiers I rubbed shoulders with on distant plains of battle. Yet this uncompromising stance in time softened, though I never lost sight of my pagan compatriots no matter how much I wrestled with my instincts. I was an old god with an old name, eyes shot through with what I had witnessed, though forgot again and again seemingly born to wield the sword unrelentingly. Oh I knew it for what it was, I was not fooled by what I deemed I was fated to embrace, duty was little more than a piss-bucket to me. I could gloat no longer over time vanquished in my looming shadow approaching, it was more like the living out of illusion the sooner to be done with it. The skills I had would have to transmogrify from this destructive delirium, lying wounded in mud on foreign battlefields serenaded by angels sent to accompany me to my proper place, yet not sent by any other than myself, momentarily forgotten in time, fallen into time like a momentary lapse in the compulsion to remain aloof from the fever dream of creation. So this is where I am, or just one of everywhere I am, come upon me in seeming urgency of death throes, a window looking in, otherwise in perfect equilibrium, even before I came to call it that, to understand it as that, The Equilibrium beyond time and space, rescue at hand. But of course the karma of so many visions of individual lives attempted to stake its claim in realistic scenarios, realistic in the sense of being lived reality, in camouflage on planetary surfaces, among those persuaded an ancient god had resurrected on seeing technology beyond their comprehension. Who would walk in my shoes? Yet always the terrifying suspicion one has chosen it, that this is one’s honour on display, not so easy to dismiss as illusion, and for what, a blankness? Whatever one’s true identity, sometimes one must consider the imagination truer, since there is little choice in its moment of glory, and one may as well partake of it as well, living fully the forgotten agenda like some Prometheus returning home.
Contemplating the heap of one’s lived lives though it is easy to find oneself at the very bottom of the pit, a diabolic frenzy minding the store.
Less well-equipped than other idols, it is easy to allow the exasperation to hate oneself, a highly contagious sect of oneself, the pulling up of oneself out of the mud, having fallen under too of one’s own consent, staggering with resignation from one’s birthplace, abandoned like a god who is one’s own salvation, the wrath of savage skies one’s sole inheritance.
But this alliance with the tradition of oneself, scion of the wilderness, falls upon its own sword, a literary affectation perhaps to summon the greater spirit lodged like shards of basalt in the flesh, the cooled volcano of better tidings its gospels burnt in an oracle of revulsion, as if standing up afresh a mighty foe of all that was, now flattened decimation, as if a temple erected where one stands though little more than a pile of rocks people gathered to mark the spot where they witnessed in ages past a god come down assembling out of atomised light. How could they not fall to their knees, I would have myself had I seen it, I merely looked on at the devastation as a visitor to this world. I did not stay long, just long enough to remember an old duty as something that tinged a new one, rejected out of hand of course but nonetheless absorbed as an invisible direction I persuaded myself I was headed anyway, without being beholden to anything or anyone, it was little more than explanatory data informing the spontaneous course, only in fleet passing moments a glimpse of a destiny, not born yesterday, millennia old, and yet, could one accord it the status of truth when time itself was a lie?
Worn out shouldering such a heavy burden. Can I not throw it off? Life only breeds turmoil. Imprisoned by whatever we think it to be. It passes and we can no longer hold the charge against it. It comes it goes, as if every circumstance trespasses upon our serenity. One tires of an attempted aloofness, as if surely by now, after all this time, one should be happier than one is. And yet, one cannot believe any fixed impression either, a regime of constant change. Yet does it impinge, really? Unable to switch it off, it seems to, but impinge upon what? Again, that knowing better, but which has ceased to be our friend. This need to suffer finds any excuse, one can hardly understand it. Waiting for it to lift hardly seems a good enough solution, yet what other is there, in this mood?
There is no elegance in it.
Only since the calamity is there satisfaction in misery, in that the worst has come, no more waiting for it. There is no need to defend oneself any longer, one is defeated, one is promoted to its rank, worshipping failure. All that one could not understand, one no longer understands, but now could no longer care less about. The burden is strangely lifted, one is free, no more artificially upholding what only wanted to collapse, that didn’t collapse out of some tepid respect for one’s efforts. Life is endurable as the unendurable, one has a curious advantage, like an eagle no longer flying over an area become a war zone, the marathon spirit takes us by the hand and says push on, leave behind these pitiful times and lands, seeds are sown of new gods in the ruined darkness illuminated by orphaned blasts. The acid rain chants its song of indifference. Civilisation is destroyed in Pyrrhic victories.
The tyranny of slaves to conditioning, hardly need tyrants any more, we can imagine them pulling strings behind the scenes but we know there’s no-one there in the shadows any more, just the usual familiar faces of scorn, for all we know they rotted long ago. Who knows who conditioned this lot but themselves. They have a body so they are a slave, you remember it don’t you?
The rage has not gone away with the slackening persecution, the desire to avenge sinks into sigils of madness. Religious conflict a nostalgia for annihilated gods, nothing of the miraculous in it, just a poison slow to take effect, lingering at the still-standing city wall, the city a wasteland of weeds growing out of the cracked concrete. As the world dies out there is increasing impatience with its death throes, only the fury is alive, the survivors reticent to turn away and forget. They are propagandised into submission all over again, recruits to the treachery skulking in the daytime, no future but martyrdom for nobody. They become the instruments of their own oppression, life little more than a pretext for revenge the ground too charred for anything else. The centuries have sped by to reach nowhere. Everlasting life just a bigot’s prayer. This is what it looks like before it falls. Salvation is not being from here, a witness to the destruction, as if its seconds subsiding away in a vision for a moment deemed actual, yet actual for many no doubt, a yawning hellscape.
But I do not belong here, I do not come from here, I report the diminished passion for life as the disaster come lapping on this shore. I may as well be talking to cadavers, attempting to resuscitate them to care, to bend away from their irrevocable march, their ingrained spectacle of dissonant events.
I only come out of the shadows to reach the half-light. One might hope the rabble might be led, but early experiments are discouraging. Hostile forces are wormed in everywhere. Should one wage war to avert disaster? Perhaps it is a matter of knowing the power of one’s unrevealed weapons. Was I not sent here solely to observe, to unleash one’s power is a failure, yet why have it if no use is to be made of it? Is it just to appreciate the strength of one’s fortifications amidst the encroaching desolate mist?
Nothing can modify the cosmic drama, it fools us with its aggression, it admits us into its illusion, until one’s only escape is to weary of it over and over again, the salvation of more reflective moods, until we no longer know its currency, its leaders, its lands, and wonder whether its events have even happened, hardly knowing any more what it means to have something happen, just vague recollections of having believed something of this nature long ago, that things were happening. It seems like something confined to a thin film floating upon the light, though we hardly know how to describe it even, even the long obsession for answers fades away leaving the questions as jigsaw pieces of loose fragmented words one can’t be bothered to put together to resemble anything in this world. Instead, one just watches the swifts careering about the sky, one moment these all over, the next all gone, then soon back again.
Living our life in pieces, daring not to put on a pedestal the wholeness we know, we carry on, unsuited to this compulsion to be, the mind remaining blank. Our instinct is to accept the fate that the puppet rails against, there is nothing else one can do when one has lost interest in life. One takes a few bark rubbings of transitory states to keep up an appearance of interest. Once one wanted to write, there is memory of that, and so one still writes, knowing it may yet have the power to paint the sullen room with something worth looking at, though few seem to want to read it. A wisdom on loan for a better time. Who knows what one may capture in adhering to this long-formed habit, certainly there is little else to do than read the thoughts of the few, despite most philosophy being a worthless trek, a hope better left at the wayside. ‘The wise one who, weary of diverse reasonings, has attained repose, neither thinks nor knows nor hears nor sees’ (Astavakra 18.27).
We diminish our insignificance and shove the world away. The future is just an object, the past a discarded dream. The sun comes out and the swifts are flying about. The imminent hangs in the air like a sentence unsaid. A simple poetry of just enough.
I no longer follow the god who has a grand design for my life, yet I see it all about, steps taken towards some great resolution, centuries in the making, I am left alone with a faith I never prayed for, the mask of vitality for a dying old soul. One can turn sharply in these fragmented fogs, as if no longer believing anything but commiserating with an elusive abstract that once seemed clearer and may yet be clarified without for ever bowing to delusion.
Is it freeing, this intolerance of understandings, no longer having anything to wish for? Is it what one wanted, to lose the will to live? A strange peace, an obscure victory, like an enemy on the threshold one coexists with. One waits for the uncertain to seem a little less precarious.
I would rather let civilisation collapse than continually have to consider it. But what then? Something else that doesn’t matter. Yet having to live it. Of course, one finds patches one doesn’t mind, if not the whole lot of it in some lights, but the harpy comes back. So I have given myself to trying to understand why this is. One cannot look forward to total destruction, yet one senses it coming, encroaching on whatever island of peace we may have that we always know is just temporary, and yet is it? The unchanging never changes. And the world seems like a fabrication, but why indulged so much? Never though as much as most indulge it. How can one feel responsible for an illusion? Nothing is mine, but I don’t even know what ‘mine’ means, I just ape a language I am conditioned into though prefer to listen to the gulls when they interrupt my deliberations with their cries. A stranger to myself, myself an unfindable convenience of language. How long must one complain about the circumstances of life? The limited horizon of wants one doesn’t even want any more, as if living out habits formed in a past that never existed. Others are having their children exterminated on a daily basis. I tend a few tomato plants, a task given myself since to do a little something fills the aching void in want of a better world. By now I am well-adjusted to imminent death. But it is not how others live, their hopes and dreams appear to keep them happy, or do they only torment them?
Are any of the voices ever mine? Do I have a voice? Sometimes I feel I am only borrowing voices from the screaming abyss, things that want to be heard, yet worthless side by side with the silence. Silence is my voice. I speak to scratch an itch. I speak in the shapes of passing clouds. Am I never under submission to this world? I survive without wishing for life, an impression imposed without end that concerns me less and less, that I endure without consequence, a battlement I guard though no-one comes to challenge it. I am cured of believing in appearances, though I continually nail to the mast the terrors I sidestep, for those immured in them.
Laughing and smiling are so proud a cover-up.
We have contented ourselves with our lives as the only recourse we have, to bear the miseries life inflicts and act the happinesses to the best of our ability, luckily in the latter to hardly notice in the moments of their blossoming that we still stand apart, perhaps this is our gratitude speaking, to hold off for another day any definitive conclusion, which is impossible to make about change, though we easily enough fall into it in depressive states since that is their nature.
Only the unchanging is as it ever was, not that there is any time to make that comparison, just speaking loosely, since language is incapable of precision in this regard. It has long been my ambition to leave unexploited the might-have-beens of life, hardly lifting a finger in the direction of anything I might have wanted, rather pulling a quizzical visage to its very meaning.
Why should we suppose we have any talent for knowing who we are, when the very one who wants to know doesn’t exist? Of course, one tires of knowing that too, as if superior to the human race. Yet it is offensive to one’s depths to suppose one is that kind of animal, little more than meat to maggots.
Even temporary membership seems a disgrace, given what human beings do, for all a few temporarily rise above it. A temporal dislocation to look through a window, one must suppose the singularity requires it, and the trillions of other eyes it looks out of. No reason to overly identify with this temporal dislocation, yet that is precisely the mistake the person makes, strangely averse to being nothing and nobody. Freedom requires that we break the slave chains of state identification since birth that we rattle all our oppressed lives. Yet I am already someone else and was before then if I want to suppose there ever was a birth. In some cascades one can hardly breathe, gravity presses down on the body like hand on a sponge, it hardly seems worth living. But it is like one is the last to leave, a final act of observation before abandonment. One always returns to something better. When one cascades one adapts automatically, as if one has always lived there on that plane. Cascade shock abates, identity there is ready-made if identity is required, a past that seems to have happened though it is neither here nor there, save that it provides friends, sense of place, a limited retinue of activities to keep one occupied until the mission-critical time arrives. One might even make a name for oneself while waiting, though what one is really there to do is totally anonymous.
The way to free ourselves of our destiny is to fulfil it incidentally, over-exertion in this regard is frankly laughable. Even having nothing to do with it one finds oneself driven.
Vaster than the universe, the singularity will not be taken to be anything. Incomprehensible, it is cut off, and yet right here sidestepping thought. It cannot ignore its pact with illusory beings, but makes no effort to be known. Infinity succumbed to boredom plunges wide of it. Is it oppressive that we cannot get rid of it, or the unbeknownst grace, an empty beach to sit a while reflecting on its timeless presence, before resuming our fidgeting in the hallucinated world. What are we even looking for, how would we know when we find it? It necessarily slips through our fingers like dry sand, to prevent its diminution, though if we look our servitude to the world is less, as if a shaken-off disgust. The tyrant of time offered up with detachment, a slain monster incoherent like lost thoughts on hearing a magpie’s insistent cackle, deemed preferable to listen to than the makeshift philosophy of mind-stained whatever it was, those idle spectres of passing empty words soliciting endless becoming, automatons of madness driven like a clock to fatten the fright of being.
Distracted to become someone, a whole continent is superimposed and overflowing, existence in eternity doesn’t blink an eyelid, invulnerable to subjugation and the appearance of being born, a triumph over time’s coffin yet not a victory since never threatened. The years pass, one’s renunciation is steadfast, incapable of getting involved. Involved in what? It seems so let go it would be like grasping mist to try to get it back. Though days come as if in challenge of their slave, their sheer presumption, their unassuming dominance, as if to flare up an old wound always new, the taskmaster of our weakness, in the chain-gang of passing moods trudging along, talents one can do nothing with, as if they were only intended to taunt, what you might have achieved, what you might have done, if only you had taken the world seriously, illusions that do not know when to give up, when they have been thoroughly defeated, yet tolerated by the one making use of abilities on the sly, in-between the massive bouts of laziness. The one conscious in his sinews of being an explorer of his inner darkness, a contemplative of trauma, unfragmented elsewhere, not needing a universe, a mere surface he has escaped being bound by, no objects to flaunt one’s mastery over and only become their possession.
What should have been is always what is. And what is never is. A cavalcade of wonders no doubt, though what passes for civilisation hardly is one, not compared with that of the future when this is just bones and dust. I call it the future, yet it has already happened, it is not a matter of getting there, just opening other eyes to it. How many eyes one has when one really starts looking. And none. Those who are stuck in time can only call it imagination, not realising that even what they suppose they’re looking at now is imagination, as are their eyes. It is that that stops them shifting their frame of reference to other coordinates, that conviction they’re here. Loosen that anchor, they’ll drift if they have no means of propulsion, no stability in what may initially seem a chaotic madness of planes, so few can see beyond the event horizon of their own brief span of life. They are perhaps luckily uncurious too, to become so untethered from their little spot. Safer to believe it impossible, to get on with the given, to not allow themselves to be menaced by the shadows of a hinterland leaking into other dimensions. It is certainly the spirit of conquest that is needed, one’s entire life becomes an impasse without the drive to overcome it. This kind of wisdom is seared into open wounds before it settles to a placid lake.
A frenzy at the approaching end might be expected of one for whom it is a new horizon, little of their life spent on philosophical and mystical contemplation, like a fright at ghosts if one has never seen them before. I am used to it, and endless other nameless terrors, I have spent my life looking at such things and divining their escape, so much so I forget others are not used to these things, for whom death will be something of a hurried acclimatisation to its strange tendrils. One could speak of disintegration, or being engulfed by vortices, forgetting it is not the everyday of most.
What is truly strange though is the superficial chitter-chatter of the masses, for whom the convulsive nihilistic planes have hardly occurred, it is hard to credit the presumably pleasant blindness their every word betrays, one could almost envy it, but then again I think how lucky I was to have such assumptions blasted apart in my twenties, such that all I ever wanted to do was explore these largely unexamined occult regions, these dimensional anomalies. A life wasted on that, and yet not wasted when considering the calamities to come, a head start on the plunge when everything begins to crumble, the certain knowledge one is in freefall even now. I did not want the illusions of normality to hide it, even more than that I sensed the fruit of my endeavour lay in the beyond and it was pointless pretending there was anything for me in the spectacle of the ordinary with these automatons hallucinating their cascade plane, I recoiled at that, seeing the plane to which I appeared to have been consigned as a kind of base, Earth something dialled into as it were, where I kept my notes, sufficiently stable for that, at least for the time being, but otherwise I couldn’t see that as ‘my life’, no, my life if I had anything to call that spanned many of these supposed lives, scattered all over time and space, simultaneously lived, but then even beyond that outlook was The Equilibrium, beyond the far future, the death of universes, to which I could not eradicate my sense of belonging even in the most dire scenarios, the most horrific cascades, leading me to believe I had truly stumbled on something magnificent though it was largely hidden from me by a wall of amnesia. Now I was no longer weary of the notion of living far futures as I used to be, thinking I’d already lived far too many lives to consider the prospect of yet more going on and on. Now it was different, the full scope of the singularity revealed itself to me, its eternal flash was not merely confined to this small window of unfolding time slowed to an individual human lifespan, such indeed seemed little more than the spatio-temporal coordinates of a blink, its start and end birth and death, already over and done with to The Equilibrium, yet perpetually alive to its own moment, for all it would be lost to other moments of the universe. I no longer saw just locally, though the immediate scene took on more importance as it was now being officially observed by an authority beyond the universe, so naturally it was not just any old space and time but where one of The Equilibrium had been issued with orders and sent. To some extent I remained aloof from such imaginings as an Earth-bound being, I did not want to reify a mere story of the agency of the beyond any more than I wanted to reify the story of being a human on Earth, let us say I fell into both from time to time but otherwise kept my distance from anything I could not prove. Of more interest was that after this encounter, or these ongoing encounters of hyperdimensional otherness, I became impenetrable to panic. Time was no longer passing for me, for all the sun rose and set and circumstances aged and lay down dust in the visible world of the planet. And I carried on writing my notes, not knowing what they were worth though suspecting they may have some mystical significance in due course, if only to me.
The present has no future, yet the future is visionary, what could be and seems in the visionary state to be so, the present one knew now in the distant past, a new present in the far future. The sense one is living in antiquity in advance of catastrophes one knows from the future’s recorded history. But one is not really here, nor anywhere, though remarkable the specific forms grown so used to as to seem to be reality, though no reality can be time-bound. Even the far future a just-as-insistent illusion, though I look at it as if I am from there, but even there I came from elsewhere, outside of time. I hope to capture some sense of it, and then leave it by the side of the road, foolish to bring it with me. I can feel not from here without holding on to any details, and what explanation is there in obligation to a diffuse agenda? I can stay in the fog just as well, learning nothing. It is more a matter of whether I am supposed to remember anything. There might be a better skill in getting used to the derangement, putting aside inventions of another time enthusiastic moods would like to bring back. Well leave it till then, if something is brought before it fades away. I cannot help think I am intended to forget these machines. If I am meant to make use of them, I will surely recall. Curiosity is little more than a desire to prove, less any yearning for the familiars of far-future objects, because that is all they’d be, just some other kind of object. In this world, in this time, they would be anomalies. I am enough of an anomaly without reaching for others. Whatever I need will be there when I need it, when everything is moving faster and faster and dread soaks into the mind, hurtling towards destruction. Compatriots are on their way, it was always my destiny to be left without them. Still I wonder, do they even exist? I have never needed any illusions, but some are kept around longer than others.
The fragmentary world does away with my existence in the absolute, this entry into history. Every day hiding a great madness, the cult of objects. The poisonous happenstance one hardly notices, rather delighting in it for a time, an absurd dare to embrace mortality.
Can you imagine, we have imagined everything. It is as if we had to, once the singularity flashed into conscious existence, what choice was there? But now the fever of appearance subsides. There is work of another sort to do.
Dreams possess all, generating events, hysterical sketches, ludicrous fabricated worlds, sometimes worlds one might have hoped were real or at least would last a little longer, better world than that one wakes to, on the basis of a person met one likes, no more real than any in the waking world where the habit of seeing through it returns, forgotten in the dream. Perhaps that is it, that naive wonder of believing in it all one reconnected with, something of one’s youth before the disappointments became too many to ignore and one sought a better way that set the world aside. The regret that it was made necessary, yet even that set aside, like a sunken city. Some semblance remaining to accompany one’s days, a spectacle one lives outside of sometimes seeming like conflicting feelings, but there is nothing that can be returned to, more that one has not fully left, yet of course one has left, there is nothing more left than this, it would be a delirium to consider it again, to prosper on Earth, the perished paradise. But sometimes it doesn’t seem like that, though always too late to engage with it again, again some regret without belief doubles as the mystifying attraction, before the vision of cataclysm calls a halt.
Only desire refuses to believe nothing is real, as if one cannot quite accept the failure to be human. But it all carries on by itself, the automaton embracing its fictions.
Few thoughts emerge from the knitted brow, thought itself is exhausted, there is nothing to deploy in words but the refusal to toil any further, having foregone the happiness of exterior constructions, the ability to complain about existence, seemingly pointing out exact matters that paint it as a mistake, consciousness of it that is, but the discernment of salvation sometimes seems so obvious as to render all complaint bogus, yet what is this salvation, this grace. It lingers, though like something that doesn’t want to be known, ununderstood but not needing to be understood, even memory of it, a pale reflection, knows this. So one is left with something one cannot skewer further, but unable to pinpoint why.
I merely collect images from the abyss to plaster my own labour, unable to let it go, because therein I founder less. Nothing remains but the obsession with my own absence. I excel as the fallen, memory of being doomed usurped in being no-one, as if every event is its deliverance, but unable to grasp it, the healing paradise.
What is this martyrdom of the senses in every weakness? What compromise its disguises? It is as if one has bold tactics, but no recollection of their planning. Of course it seems like just another torment of reaching a conclusion dashed away as no conclusion can ever be reached, slow to see the gain in that. What desires are there left to organise, they seem little more than heavily mediated promises, continually doing things by halves, one’s abdication plain sitting in the wilderness mulling over how one got there. Some kind of infernal condition no longer witnessed, thrown away, some new ideology for ever keeping the truth at arm’s length, all the synonyms rejecting their equivalence, demanding unique words yet to be spoken. I can say it is like many things, a direction, a wisdom, something proclaimed in lieu of a goal, racing towards some triumph perpetually held off; not becoming, that sustained ambiguity, yet not being either, void, remoteness from time, space just a description of things, a discipline of illusion, the proclivity of things found alluring, the life of people, the faraway anomaly, even the elixir of the alchemists without vigour to elicit the required transmutation, little more than a step on the way and toxic in the storm’s darkening light cast over, renewal an arbitrary order outdinned by the thundercrack of other worlds, the extravagance of deliverance paralysed by the cup of poison thought a blessing, the downpour a teleportation of a dark realm. A yellow light illuminating the surface of puddles hovering a foot off the ground in a room, no source for this light, an inner light projected, reaching down to check they are not wet, forgotten where before this, some annihilation, an abandoned cascade, a return unrecognised as yet. From the future? Or an immediate alternative? Some other dimension striking fear, but passed now, just the yellow puddles in the darkness, a hand passing through them as if they are not there, a fascination for their realistic externalisation, no memory of the revolution, just long moments of unexpected beauty hallucinated but no less beautiful, nobody to know what has been stripped away, nor any sense of participating in the restoration of the annihilated, regenerated from the absolute just a sidestep away, a universe to exist in that soon will seem alike to the one destroyed, a universe within oneself in no time to look out at, as if captured by but actually just a metaphysical switch, the agent of destruction unconscious, creation a new possession, its essence no longer threatened by conditions that were untenable, a revelation lost to astronomical distance, but a knack a power it seems one has, but never surviving in memory as a comprehended vastness, only some other having that benefit, yet not an otherness of someone else, rather horrific faith in who one really is, fortunate to have no pride, no-one to have it, just a name for a will to power no enemy can face, nor friend, a quickly attended-to incarnation, a temporary forever-forgotten avatar that may return at any time, a return to a different land, when needed, beyond birth and death, but now back here, a lost Earth reassembling, nothing having happened to it, but knowing it is not the same Earth, retaining that much, a privilege of an authority at the core, of The Equilibrium. No need to know any further, the planetary tributes come to a virtual madman simmering down from a seizure.
The tiniest illusion imposes full-flood concentration, especially the illusion of being beyond illusion.
An obligatory illusion necessitated by remaining in life, which can never fully accommodate itself to one’s experiments, as if the anomaly is inherent no matter what one does.
One is free in the sense of having renounced freedom, or at least something that goes by that name, while something without any name intoxicates without regret, as if for ever departing a meaninglessness getting old by the second, a talent for holding aloof some dereliction of duty, impactless, the vagueness of a cloud, not even longing any more, the unevocable, in the future as the present, looking back. So already gone as it arrives, unable to get drawn in as if something of importance that needs to be dealt with now, already dealt with, long ago. Yet a boredom too, that the sky never feels with its impasse, but without detail to hold the attention, so passing away also. Something overthrown, yet a world remains, senseless but not requiring sense, a lunatic god in the gap, pulverised dreams scattering their fragments and dust. Discrediting the frenzy of one’s contaminated faculties, lucidly of a different Earth, an inseparable Hell threatens its own hallucination, a contradiction held in equilibrium so at bay. We squander our psychological curiosity as much as mortals on divining the correct response, even if we call it philosophy it is still just dwelling on a demon’s trick, the weak comedy of a whole lifetime. The cult of the abyss calls us from the very bottom, bottomless pitch black, yet the voices must come from somewhere, some undertaking one has vowed to see through to the end, foolishly externalising inner voices as if delighting in the ambiguity.
The glory of a demon lies in its unexpected response, full of an ancient intelligence, as if knowing the divine origin and willing to be its oracle. Such at least was the characteristic of the beings I encountered, for all they presented a frightening face, and even that grew beautiful the more I gazed in apprehension trying to encompass what I was seeing. As if they recognised me, and I them, in the performance of roles written into a scorpion-stung mysticism as the rational crumbled away, an inscrutable mystery feigned to become real, as real as the inspiration of The Fool stepping into thin air on the edge of a crevasse, a kind of wisdom of the frozen moment pulled back. A secret grace of danger.
Philosophy deserts us. Playing in unheard-of possibilities the questions breath another air. Even suffering is little more than a perturbation of the mind. The collapse of civilisation fascinates us of another time, of a more refined serenity. The hysteria of ancestors, the inability of their prophets to convey what their angels told them, all symptoms of the collapse. So they go off to live in solitude, watching it from afar, by which I mean the epicentre unnoticed by all around, though they may have wished for some other wilderness, a fine moor surrounded by mountains, this seems just as much a wilderness in the city when one’s ties fall away, withdrawal is of another kind, encroaching deeper, the absolute nothingness requires no packing of bags, unsaid prayers are good enough anywhere, just different kinds of fears to subdue.
The most inspired latches onto the first bolthole of antiquity, the noisy possession of ‘the truth’ as a leap beyond uncertainty and fear. Though not quite able to become a convert, and knowing one’s conviction will change in time, is perhaps the wiser truth, as if one were a mere neophyte in belief, belief as fragile as a delicate plant to the gale. More than anything, the sense of being among the riffraff descending on the easy pickings discarded by philosophers calls a halt, rather defeat than search with the wrong people for the commonly found. One becomes a traitor to this kind of truth, as if one cannot act in such a manner more than open revolt, one sees it as the hand-me-downs of the rabble, half wishing one could be that simplistic and follow what others have laid down, knowing instead one is going to have to find it for oneself, throwing away the voluminous chatter skirting around it for millennia, chasing fading echoes amplified into something else in the marketplace of ideas. Centuries of thought hardly saying anything, demonstrating a capacity for repetition aspiring for little more than lighting another lamp from the original flame further and further away from its source, little of the eruption of the same molten influence supposed to have been there long ago. Occasional outliers usually burnt at the stake for heresy of the groupthink. Catastrophic wrecks run aground on the rocks casting their doomed shadows over time, better followed as one chooses weapons, listening to the damned as prophets at the crossroads, looming destructive forces tamed by the wild at heart who may come across them as a breath of fresh air, and then they too discarded as stronger forces arise within amplified in the crucible of disenchantment, as if this was the way it was meant to be, a black flame passed on, secret and underground, gaining power as an occult current, claiming its own sacrifices, an aficionado of the dregs, magus of fevered brows, a gracious will the strength of the afflicted. This one’s society is a wasteland, this one’s civilisation is tottering, this one’s enemies are clawed carrion.
Grave-diggers know his name, he haunts the pastures, his path is beaten by panic. Without irony, he is the hurried one, he takes his time all the same to scrutinise the hordes like a tiger glaring, glaring. He is ready to emerge from the silt at the bottom of the thawing tarn. Yet the shuddering horrors are not his, he is the antidote, a forgotten better promise, the opportunity of chaotic crowds suddenly focused with the laser vision of an avenging angel. He does not renounce his solitude, the ticker-tape parade of one self fractally generating infinite others, suffering with him and because of him.
Listening back to the silence of our voices, the face of the future obtrudes, it speaks only to itself, vanished from its own absence, it stoops to accuse no-one though everyone feels the blame. We have been living in our own defeat though none ever gained such a victory over us. Our lives have been condemned by our inaction in allowing the disgrace. If you say ‘Which disgrace?’ the opposing force will only say, ‘Quite’. If you are not to be bogged down in seizing hold of the world at last, as if with a force of mission, resignation in failure is an appropriate first sign of dignity returning. The artifice of history is a trial long over, a nothingness coldly let go, one now has a chance to be an accomplice of the visionary. Salvation is for people standing up, not lying in the gutter for all they are looking at the stars. Dreams die escorted out in defiance defending the devouring fire of self-immolation’s protest. The insolence of the warmongers paints a target on their backs, they should get down on their knees and grovel to be forgiven their shame, but their self-serving prayers cannot be heard over the din of explosions so what chance they will grind their knee bones into the rubble with a little more sincerity. Meaningless war will make any reprimand hollow unless it comes with force, and it will do, when least expected, to snatch the Devil’s gold and replace it with plutonium.
A provoked disaster, that flattens hope, cuts down our eyes. We try to rescue the condemnation, but even consolation seems beyond us. Yet The Equilibrium is already adjusting matters, we simply do not appreciate the scale upon which it is working, rescue is immediate but may not look like it. Once I was caught in a slow-motion explosion. I asked, ‘Why is The Equilibrium not rescuing me?’ The answer was: ‘This is The Equilibrium rescuing you.’ By slowing down time almost to a stop they were able to retrieve me even from an explosion. It was as if they wanted to show me, to impress upon me, they would always find me and get me out, even if they had to reverse time. It created a loyalty, these early experiences of trying to understand what I had encountered, what I was ‘of’. Now I do not even know what they were rescuing. The body? Hardly.
The sense of panic no doubt, struck into the formless void, an identification undergoing horrendous events, yet even events indefinable, some form of course, some spatio-temporal whereabouts momentarily looked into, as if being there from afar. An I-ness that dissolves but needed for work, but why is work needed, it seems an absolute grace embracing the phenomenon, not dismissing it as mere illusion, though it is of course. Still, the running of these possibilities of universes is a kind of computation, illusion within it if taken as actuality, but outside, if we may so speak for a moment, inside and outside that too illusion, there is a sense of looking after it, powers to insert oneself in any time and space, to eliminate war in all systems, to drive the hostiles out. I forget so much on the surface of the planet, it becomes little more than a faith in something crazy, but on hyperspatialisation and return to The Equilibrium, it is Earth that seems so far away.
I have stopped wondering ‘who I am’ in the greater terms, as if looking for an intermediary between an Earthbound name and the singularity itself, a life of lives, as if the name of an angel or demon would satisfy me. There is a hyperspatial identity, its name a kind of record of particular activity. But perhaps I seek more for others of that kind by wishing to name this one. It seems there are, but they are rarely encountered, and then doubted in the amnesia of return to Earth. More curious why the amnesia is never entirely complete, as if it were important to retain an inkling, a comfort perhaps on an arduous mission, that I concede. Yet it also seems like so much fiction to indulge the days, otherwise spent watching the sunny and stormy days, the local wildlife, a little gardening, and reading in a garden chair. But a clandestine appeal to revolutionary activity, impossible if it were just down to humans. Some kind of conviction in an immortal agenda revealing itself, as if hard to believe the dusty absurdity of planetary life. I was made for something else, outside of time, an absolute solitude, a paradise of glassy obsidian planes, alone there as I am alone here, yet in contact with everything, foreseeing hundreds of thousands of years of Earth from the perspective of the planetary anchor, yet even that the distant past to one of The Equilibrium. I have said it before, but I say it again in the hope of saying it a little differently, to indicate that more has dribbled out from forgetfulness, yet how much made a reified object of the elect from the retained debris of other worlds. Even the planetary one knows better than that.
Still of course there is the anthem of the divine and demonic, somewhat old-fashioned to the hyperspatial, the newness of which hasn’t yet had time for myths to concretise, or is somewhat averse to them from the start, having no objects to contain them but vague notions only momentarily clear as actual coordinates, soon lost once the action is over. And what action is that, a karmic sort, always seeming like leftovers, an audacious prarabdha, can’t be ignored but amounting to nothing in the aftermath, perhaps a good turn done, to nobody. To speak in words necessarily retains some of the old concerns of words, hard to find the words for the new concernless structures, even alien languages speak of the old. So the old has to become the means of describing the new, and even then, there is nothing new to the one beyond it.
But words of any type serve to unsettle it, the silt is always stirred up. Every believer finds the abyss. No matter what distaste one may have had for coming to a conclusion, the abyss will provoke one, hard to remain aloof from that, its voices screaming at you from everywhere, nothing but conclusions, one after another and another. There is no holding off from knowledge until one has seen what it is, rather the wrong knowledge continually supplants itself, even the safest ledge is utterly absurd, a black terror feasting upon itself, making any presumption to be a philosopher in the face of all trials just something fallen away dashed down into the darkness. Beyond good and evil you say, more lost souls for want of light. But there is a kind of apostle of the blackness who knows the character of the traversal. His nature is that of the stampede while remaining in stillness. He has torn the veil too many times to be fooled by it now. He is a devotee of the dark. An enthusiast of venomous strikes, a drunkard of the absurd, his throws of the dice strangely favour him, the spectacle an obvious curse he need not consider longer than a glance before tossing it away with a gesture of the hand, a magician engineered into the abyss as his natural habitat, only then remembering he is Lord of Illusion. Such a one the abyss torments no longer, he steps sideways into and out of it, as an ancient adopted a magical walk upon approaching a haunted dark forest that had to be travelled through, whether supernatural dangers lurked or just bandits. Protected like a dignitary of another realm. The infinite gulf emanates from him, the stars exalt him, he is safe from discovery as any ordinary mortal. He speaks like a spitting cobra when he wants to. Though alone he seems to command hidden armies, one cannot cross his line.
We witness living creatures all about unwitting in their activities, the continuous mechanical functions, the cat licking its fur, the bee inspecting flowers, and see it also in humans, little different to plants turning towards the sun. There is a cold automatism playing out, indifferent, sometimes rejoiced in as a marvel, but equally a savage repetition accomplishing nothing but going on with ourselves forced to be intimate volunteers wondering openly about our impotence to affect anything. And then, what is there to affect, it seems little more than moving a handful of ocean from one spot to another in a scenario that has other plans. There seems some advancement at least in becoming wise to it, though few ever do but the lonely monks who dedicate their lives to peering beyond. Their resemblance to us is as an example we don’t want to follow, even when we ourselves have realised the shallowness of appearances. Yet we follow them anyway, perhaps sometimes in a way we think they should follow, since aren’t they making too much of a fuss? But we continually have our fur stroked the wrong way by our endless questions in even more solitary retreat. They at least have company, a doctrine to attempt to adhere to, we are making it up as we go along, but at least it seems closer to the source of what they are following, without the library it is bound up in, the millennia of commentary yielding little over and over again. One keeps of course a handful of books that have spoken more insistently over the years, diamonds found in the dungpile, unforgiving of the sheer trudge to find such works.
It is peculiar how one is even more inclined to give up after one’s long legacy of not giving up, but knows one won’t. Yet such perseverance presents more as an inability to stop than an ability to go on. Perhaps one can be grateful for the mechanism of that, at least in one’s better moments. One’s enterprise seems a corpse quickly grown cold, there is little left but to continue pursuing it. Yet is it a pursuit any more, ever more it seems forced, an idiot savant doing a puzzle in an asylum. There is a distaste for the activity, but there always was, one is used to it. What would it mean to renounce it? Bold words for something one is unable to do. Sunny days seem to forgive him his solitude, yet quickly induce wishes to be elsewhere. Only as night falls does the irritable animal calm into a new instinct.
Writing confers some sense of removing the thorn in the flesh, if only to display one’s blood on the point. An artwork of a decaying mind, the tormented, the possessed, and yet with a wisdom beyond it all, these cascades one attempts to compel, to force towards their limits, when they become cacophonous, circling on the blighted one like buzzards. The exploration always seems invited, which rescues it from triviality, one is not really overcome with remorse, one is just trying it on for size, one will allow it to be snatched away by a strange salvation, or little more than a small change, as if noting a minor error in the margin of one’s understanding. One rises to one’s kind, and it is not human, toying with a vision of the damned, a better kind of prophet than one supposed, though still an obscure force chained to observations of a lethargy broken at long last by spectral intervention, some secret of his daily life, a glinting nugget of gold in the sieve, something that can no longer be scoffed at, not that one wants gold nor even any of the things it might represent, it is more one had forgotten some aspect that slots into place to dispel the decay, if only to declare one an artist after all, not merely sunk into the habitual obsessions in the usual disjointed activity. There was a reason one came this way, it is not just a pitiful payment to lift a little the life of the subhuman. It seems a digression, it always does, when enlisting the Devil’s vacuum to preach the genius replacing the torment suffered because of it. The audacity of the anguish is placed at a distance and disappears, the contrary seems true. One’s abandonment of society is confessed like an apology for the force of it. He breaks apart planetary slavery like one faithful to a forgotten revolution from another star system. It is like it is his religion, though he smashes all idols in its guiding light.
What in any case is a cascade plane? A quickly passing fiction of life, for ever cascading from its source, The Equilibrium, immediately lost. There are no planets, just cascade planes interpreted as such in their conditioning, having no more solidity than successive generations of fireflies.
Watching four little white egrets striding about in the shallow water of the overflow channel their eyes cast down for small fish. An unhurried interlude to a rushing day.
The wind is blowing hard but the dandelion clock remains intact.
Instability awaits anyone who concerns themself with history, since it naturally goes in cycles. Being a seer is a ruinous career, one cannot at any price become attached to acts, the residue of humanity currently alive on Earth relapsed into a historical role, never quite attained to transcendence due to their violence, subsumed by the system to pursue the fever of destruction as if it were a vocation that must be fulfilled. This curse, this curse of history, forces aggressors and victims, and ineffectual protest. The appearance marches on, over and over again with its wars. One cannot get to grips with this spectacle at all, even if one sees through it, even if to most it seems so out of tune with the time, this regressive scandal. One merely hopes bombs do not come raining down on one’s own head and gets on with one’s day with all its trivia, resenting even having to think about it, knowing the children of others are getting blown to bits, surely it would mean something more if it were happening every day in this country, and then one goes back to reading one’s book, sipping one’s tea, listening to the birds. What else can one do? There is a special scorn that will be reserved for our time, or I should say your time, as it is nothing to do with me. I am just a chronicler they sent, I can’t do anything as everything has already been done that we can do, my kind. At least for now. It is more a matter of taking a good hard look at it now, and remembering you do not have the excuse of medievalism any longer. A new dark ages perhaps, one of perpetual distraction, corporate control, media intrusion, total surveillance, weapons of mass destruction. Faces illuminated by small bright rectangles in every town square of an evening. Films of other eras, not so long back, present an absence of what is hardly noticed in this time so ubiquitous is it. One feels like an evolutionary curmudgeon to reject at least this one object. Not much of an achievement, yet not part of that. That eyesore of the time. Rather be caught reading the output of a pamphleteer, notwithstanding that such could be read in that form. It is hard to know what the objection is, something to do with not being a part of it, that downward daze into pixels while walking the streets like so many numbered cattle herded into steel stalls. Instead, one watches on, standing under a tree viewing the evening is good enough, and on the underground, watching robots being born on the opposite seats.
The idolatry of high-minded views, a prejudice of mind, fraternities of the agreement of ideas, their procedures and renunciations, ready-made minds scarcely stepping outside of the trifles of doctrine, the absurd fraud of comforting deliverance in favoured lies.
Truths incompatible with wanting to possess nothing, wanting nothing but freedom, having forgotten what the word means, if it ever meant anything. Was it not just another conditioning? Neither this nor that is still full of anxiety, since anxiety doesn’t need to be lucid, it can remain vague, all the better for not seeing through it, a swarm of day-to-day hopes and failures, something difficult to make out on the distant horizon but felt close by as apprehension, not even doubts as one cannot tell about what, nor even whether it is worth one’s concern. This must happen in many a mind, though there is only one and then not even that. It is better to fling it all away as an imposter begging to dupe us. What point having dislikes when this only formulates them. There are no depths of mind to plumb, a shallow scab of air. Yet how to stare it down when it seems so pensive, so intent on standing in front of us, a sloth of sentiments scraped from a world of fools. It is a light in a darkness it has invented. The mind labours to pick fruit off bare trees. Its relativistic masks of the absolute like knock-off antiques in a bazaar. Yet its philosophy continues to perpetuate itself, the brightest minds not bright enough to see through it. A mere dogma plasters over the tragic and becomes a wailing wall for the faithful who imagine themselves scalers of the profound. University departments prospecting for gold at a backward frontier. But what can one tell them, they have a job to further the flood plains of the mind, earning their living from an inept philosophy, so many words in perpetual surrender, fostering still more obscurities for the intellect, certain any day to happen upon something that makes sense. Still one reads it, as if in a feverish need of theories, clowns commenting on clowns, the chance at least for a wild bewilderment before yet another abandonment. A wide-eyed eager expectation of happening upon the odd nugget, having to drastically pan others’ bloated thoughts because they didn’t have the decency or the wit to do so themselves before placing them before the public. Such a mining of moments must hope for a reversal of time to before there was any idea anything had happened, happening now seeming impossible to cut off with no further ado. The intimacy of the void stands ever luminous beyond the obsession with thought, but in the world it is a given that the world cannot just disappear, for all we know it is nothing. The drab inevitability of cyclic miseries nonetheless finds it hard to penetrate the great indifference. If only the joys were as easy to dispose of, since it is these that allow the sorrows to come creeping back.
One can read the future in genius, a species of prophet, all about seeming to speak of what is to come, every seed seen growing in the world, but some evenings the smile wearies into a hangdog expression hardly able to endure any more, lucidity like a daylight whose sun never sets.
One’s view is vast, even the entirety of civilisation a speck, one sees all of time and space and beyond even that, yet one pretends not to by setting it aside like stale thoughts, confident if there is anything important to see one will be alerted to particulars. It is a kind of madness one doesn’t need to believe in, belief truly making it crazy, yet not even believing in the commonplaces most take for granted, there are people, there is a world, there is birth and death, there is time, there is space. All of it one sets aside, not discriminating between the vastness and ordinary planetary life. I do not seek akashic knowledge, akashic knowledge seeks me, it comes to inform me as if I am required to process it for a short period, it appeals to authority codes for direct access, a message from The Equilibrium. I am someone else then, and yet no different, just dormant before. I can only live in the cascades, on this cascade plane, roughly Earth Intersectional as if human like the rest of them, by an act of forgetting, but being of The Equilibrium it is never entirely forgotten, rather set aside, until I am needed, when the off-world destiny is instant, an extraterrestrial communication, permission seeking of a command-and-control structure. Otherwise, I grow tomatoes and read books, sometimes doubting the assignment but nonetheless attempting to write the view from my position. I thought at first that may be the assignment, but it seems it’s just a peripheral activity to keep from losing my mind. Though certainly I cannot see where I am now as anything other than the cascades, so something of the other life has clearly filtered through, I have remembered solidly what I was instructed to remember, that I am of The Equilibrium. More than that it is hard to say, save what comes out in my repeated forays into words exploring my apparent attitudes, I say apparent because little stays the same, though there is a kind of consistent thread I won’t claim to fully comprehend. Pessimistic outlooks are not entirely true, just an attempt to salvage the catastrophe in knowing atmospheres. It remains to be seen in any case since there could be cascade shift. The future I write about at the start may be different to the future I write about at the end, and what of beyond that, beyond time, that I am far more confident about. I believe only in the absolute, not in the tempestuous changes, for all I appear to be here to address them.
Who would rule their life by dreams? One eventually gains a little expertise in the transfusion of venom that living in the cascades makes one prey to, deserting the common hopes, almost as if one has some privilege in passing through, though dwelling just a little will easily persuade despair has not gone into hiding. So one doesn’t even look at it unless pounded into submission. I wouldn’t say it was easy, you have to ransack your life to remove anything that might wound you if allowed to grow. The discipline of one who otherwise does nothing, unless called upon by other dimensions, living a life of salvation though without prayer, one forgets what prayer is, perhaps it is little more than constancy in the face of continual trials.
The insurrection is doomed to be corrupted, a pathetic attempt, yet each failure lodges in time Lucifer’s call to action, a dissatisfaction that forces out the rebels against creation as it stands, not that there is any need to say it is God-created, nor even to say it is actually created when it is little more than a seems-to-be. This realisation ought to throw us back into contemplation of our own error in supposing it is so, but nonetheless the form this must take (must it?) is denunciation of the spectacle, externalised (external to what?), as if operated by forces beyond us and hostile to us. This is merely siding with tangibles, not getting to the heart of the protest. One is kicking up a storm of revolt in looking for a way to express it, and also appealing to those who have no will or capacity to look within (within what?). That there is nothing to divide, to make a something, can wait until we have ameliorated the oppressive circumstances, it doesn’t seem useful to say what circumstances, as if you are yet to divide to make somethingness out of nothingness, since obviously this is the incurable path of history, reluctant to drop everything, though knowing how to is surely a worthwhile skill and may even inform the fantasy of revolt one seems constantly attracted to.
What would we do if there were nothing to protest? This for many would be to cease living, some indeed cease living in the course of their protest, a useful knack if you have it. Some things are more important than life, clearly. It makes a samurai spirit to live on that knife-edge. Is the revolution one longs for merely a continual pining for a false dawn? Or is it rather the certain and specific direction one is pledged to, avowed to seek no matter what? How to seize the day that has not yet come? By seizing the day today in full understanding of that far-off horizon. No more dilly-dallying with the thought that it may never arrive, rather having a certainty that it will, and maybe even in retrospect. A vision of the future is already fulfilled, getting there is just the millennia. One has already seen it, there is no longer the paralysis of ignorance, and even the millennia seem small. One cannot quite account for this beyond-timeness. The span of a human life seems deliberately short to keep one in small thinking, but the human life set aside as a convenience of spatio-temporal coordinates one is permitted to see into the far distance that is not so easily understood as another time, another place, as that naturally appears fantastical to the one bound to a short span on Earth, this time, this place. Nonetheless, with an appeal to fiction one can at least conceive it with less objection, even though I am not talking about fiction, save that all is. I lie at the intersection of myself with many dimensions not ordinarily known. Only through repeated immersion and the eventual acquisition of GSH (Gyroscopic Stability in Hyperdimensions) from the future was I able to access The Equilibrium from the chaos of cascade planes that disguise and protect it. Beyond human life, I saw things quite differently, even on return traces remained. I have said that I wish to write a philosophy of cascade planes, but what can one construct from traces? Yet with traces one can put together a beginning, a continual hammering away at something vague and hard to figure out, for all the knowledge is innate when one is out of the cascades, by which I mean in The Equilibrium. Earth here and now is a cascade plane, I have said as much, but there are other cascade planes one can cascade into and live for uncertain lengths of time until returning via The Equilibrium to one’s anchor point, that being what I previously characterised as current-day Earth, that is the life one appears to be living ‘now’, for all one appeared to be living other lives equally ‘now’, in other cascade planes. Sometimes the human life on Earth now, the anchor, itself appears to consist of multiple cascades, only for simplicity referred to as a single cascade plane, a matter of conditioning inherent in the state, that this is ‘Earth’, for instance, taken totally as a matter of trust, or conditioning, which is what it really is that has solidified a cascade into a cascade plane. Actually, it remains the cascades, it is only to simplify understanding that we regard it as having ‘come out somewhere’. It never comes out, it is still cascading. But conditioning conveys familiarity allowing one to ‘live somewhere’, as opposed to being satisfied with being no-one and nowhere. Practically everyone of course has lost sight of this being the cascades, and those few who do manage to access different cascade planes can end up conditioned into hallucinatory states and mental illness, because they lack the stability to negotiate them possessed by a hyperdimensional engineer through GSH, those who can freely roam without being affected, those ‘of The Equilibrium’. Again, it appears I am using fictional means to describe the actuality because merely to say it is anything carries the danger of reifying it, thereby making it subject to doubt as ‘something’. But one can say it is something, and then say treat it as fiction, as a way of holding off that something from being understood in a limited way, because as something it is just nothing, words conjured from the air, yet all the same attempting to convey . . . something. How can one talk about the hyperdimensional engineers, for example, without objectifying them as multiple? One talks of ‘they’ in the same manner as talking of humans as ‘they’, in the implicit assumption they are many. Surely we have long ago got over the idea that there are individually named angels and demons? Or entities of any kind? As I have said, The Equilibrium is effectively abandoned. If there are others there they left as I arrived. And that is the plain truth of the matter. The way The Equilibrium makes others is in the cascades. The ultimate conditioning is subject-object duality. The rest is just the infinite variations of that. Worlds and beings, though it be but the cascades.
Our incapacity to appreciate the rhythm of life, its cyclic wonder, is because we appear to be affected by it. Realising we aren’t, save through identification with changing circumstances, we are freed to see it, to ponder how it could possibly be. That it isn’t seems merely theoretical while watching the bees, listening to the crows, the endless fascination of the patterns of the seasons. Whatever we do is a kind of revolt against doing nothing, even if we limit it to what cannot be avoided, eating, watering plants. Being alive, at least seeming to be, imposes its agenda, though true enough the simplicity of few things to do soon seems like doing nothing, so long as there is no rush about it.
My rebellion widens, less a display of convictions than a rehabilitation of youthful desire never gone away. I forget quite how to the point I have been over the years, it fades into the shade under trees watching the world go by. I forget how ardently planning I have been, with my legs stretched out in idleness. Time has gone by as dust accumulates on books, blown off every so often. A strange thing to observe death will come some time, sooner now so as to have its own horizon in sight, pushed away into a cloud before, and still the words I have placed in books have hardly been read by anyone. It is the feeling of having been spared something, though that may only be rationalisation for not having the audience that in my youth I felt would surely come. A trickle of readers though reminds me of the trickles starting off becks I have seen high in the mountains, knowing where they are going down below, the mighty river snaking through the patchwork of fields. Up here the air is clear, the wants few, the water pure enough to drink. A fine place to stay a while. No people, best of all, no people.
Between bouts of lucidity the deceptive mutations continue. I have never seemed to need to be a believer, though doubtless strong beliefs are there, picked up along the way. Blunt denials of illusion, knowing it never gives up, though nothing clung to that doesn’t arise of itself.
In solitude the dream of existence occasions no questions or panic, it is rather the first hint of society coming to welcome one back that does that. One needs a long run-up to embed in solitude without wish for anything more. There is great power in indifference to the world, it is like a vocation in the midst of it, there is nowhere for confusions to arise from. One can let one’s sordid age go.
There is a lot of be said for doing only the things a person a hundred years ago might have done, or two hundred, or three. To know there is nothing about this life that is hugely dependent upon the age one lives in. Of course one will take advantage of electricity if one has it, yet still know there is much that doesn’t require it, without being too concerned it is going to disappear and affect the broader society that one lives in, such as the water supply. It is rather living in the sound of the wind. When one sees what there is to return to, there is no need to mind straying into the modern world. Its obsolescence is seen already.
No longer a prisoner of the age, one is free for ages not yet, times of other skies, a rebel still, transmitter of ideas closer to their apogee, finding a serenity in the far future, and then not even time at all, as if run out of runway, no longer anything that seeks one’s conformity, and thereby a recognition of one’s origin, free of the cascades.
The hyperdimensional engineers call it cascading. I picked up this term from them early on, before I knew my other identity, before I broke through to this other plane, when first I came across them on the periphery of my experimental breach. Before I knew of The Equilibrium, before I knew I was one of them. It did not seem they had come to find me, and later on I did not encounter them very much except as myself, as if I had absorbed them, as if he had absorbed them, as if they were his reflection until I saw he was within, and what they did he did as if another body occupying the same space as the human one, but kitted out with advanced technology only he knew how to access that I was to learn looking over his shoulder as it were. Only an engineer could ‘cascade’ through time and space. A seemingly static region is known as a ‘cascade plane’, temporarily stable as a world though little more than coordinates to an engineer. Earth 21st century roughly speaking a cascade plane, though its moments cascading themselves, elapsing, flowing, fixed only as a consensus of the beings of that plane, little more than illusion to an engineer. Yet still it was my anchor point in the cascades, my human person, a place of return, a perch, little more than a perch in the chaos of the cascades, the ferocious cascades. You only saw the ferocity on departing The Equilibrium, from which it all cascaded into innumerable cascade planes, innumerable worlds, times and places. When I was in The Equilibrium it seemed there was no-one else, and empty as I arrived. The ‘others’, those others ‘of The Equilibrium’ were in the cascades, as if split off on departure. When I was there I could see their anchors, as if in flashes of seeing through their eyes, very little to distinguish ‘their’ anchor from ‘mine’. And then there was total access to those not of The Equilibrium, who if accessed could become ‘of The Equilibrium’, but it would only be done if there was a need, more likely an engineer would cascade into their vicinity without need of an anchor disguised by chameleon tech, only visible as a shimmer to local hyperspatialised, drug experimentalists exploring hyperspace without GSH, as I myself when I first encountered the engineers, not realising it was my own entry to The Equilibrium they were engineering, leading me along to emerge from my cocoon of space-time and begin to cascade and learn to activate GSH, which was needed to cross the power differential, the abyss that protected The Equilibrium from any not of it, let alone being able to find it. I still remember my first glimpses, like a beautiful ship off in the distance in the sea of hyperspace, as if coming for me, edging ever closer, yet so daunting, its vast obsidian steep glassy sides like a mountain as it came closer rising up to a sharp pinnacle, sometimes feeling I was inside, on the lower levels, seeing no way to rise, as if tested severely by its might and splendour, yet drawn, inexorably drawn, to master this perplexity, to find the destiny it intimated. All that seems so long ago now. When I returned to Earth it was hard to be here, knowing of this other life, a life outside of lives that sought my entreaty, drawing me on and on to come to meet it. At first I naturally assumed it was extraterrestrial, I had no idea it was only so by virtue of not being terrestrial, rather it encompassed what we call extraterrestrials, to whom it was as much a mystery as it was to me, those extraterrestrials at least who had encountered it. ‘You are of The Equilibrium, you are not of the extraterrestrials’ it told me itself. The Equilibrium was beyond them all. Sometimes I thought it presents itself this way to me, as if a story, simply as a way of communicating. It told me to forget everything except that I was of The Equilibrium, when reentering the cascades, but inevitably fragments of story remained, which I lessened in importance to that main message. I saw no other anchors on Earth, by which I realised The Equilibrium had come to Earth in response to my signal, that I had somehow activated when the time had arrived, via, I supposed, an alien implant placed in my left temple over three decades before, that extraterrestrial surgeon of The Equilibrium. But how did I know any of this, so much was locked away behind the amnesia seal and even to me it seemed little more than fanciful stories in the absence of tangible facts, the only truly tangible fact The Equilibrium itself, whatever that was I could not deny its impact on me, how it seemed even the true explanation for otherwise inexplicable extraterrestrial encounters prior to its breaking through. It is easy to reify scenarios that are nothing but fantasy, but that I was ‘of The Equilibrium’ put up less argument in trying to reconcile back in the cascades, without access once again, though more and more this other self asserted its presence.
It certainly seems one is stuck in time, all the more surprising then how lightly one lifts free of it, revealing one was never confined by time.
When I hear particularly loud planes, I think it is a missile, I live in expectation of missiles, such is the psychic state one is forced to exist in when hostile forces have taken the world to the brink. One almost longs for an aftermath to have it over and done with, but being forced to eke out survival in the rubble will soon seem like a further taunt of mentality. It is like being cornered in a maze, no will to go on but forced to go on. Odd more people don’t see it, decorating the walls of their dream with hopes and desires. But I know The Equilibrium is pushing back the hostiles, surrounding them. The stake I have in this age is all for The Equilibrium, otherwise I am not here, I am there. These cascades don’t touch me, though very trying to lose sight of that. There is nothing here of my own, whatever that might mean. I see a bookcase, cooking implements, clothes, but very little else, a minimum of furniture, bare floorboards painted white. There is nothing I want, save to continue to occupy the hours, writing, gardening, reading, eating. A simple life in solitude, seeing a few people should they come my way, but not my primary existence, so not feeling the tug of it, that illusory life of what I might be doing, concentrating on that all the time, wishing for things, and people, time spent with people. A philosophical and poetic life, one might say, yet the sense it is nothing. The inescapable meditation on nothing, a detached delirium, existential acrobatics, wisdom as if it is a possession state, a deliquescent trance giving life meaning, yet what is meaning, sinking down into quietism, cutting off the lure of the world. Civilisation continuously collapsing, a desperado on the edges of it, for ever the sound of missiles coming, but none come. Some invariable homunculus, a sizeless fallen one engulfed mysteriously by the world as if lying under a pile of dead leaves, as if it should have no more significance than a tiny insect blown from one’s arm with a gentle puff, if having wings, or allowed to walk onto a nearby ivy leaf if not. But the unchanging seems less a being with no others of its kind, yet neither is it an unliving background, the most alive on hearing a crow caw, as if reminded of it again and again, the living consciousness unchanging to the world, unfed by becoming, unseen by sights, needing no great effort of understanding, as if it enjoys the dare to change because it likes persuading again and again that it will not, cannot. But why a joy in realising that? It just is. It is not here because it is nowhere, yet it is right here, always. It has no concerns for appearance. It will not suffer paradise. There will be no mistakes in its course, there is nothing to come it does not already know, because everything is the same to it, objectless. One cannot even say that anything appears to it, as then there would be two. It is more as if everything is absorbed. One hears the crow, but there is only the unchanging; one hears the cricket match in the field, the unchanging is unchanged, just different words and images. The sound of water down the drain, what has changed? One can look about for ever, listen for ever, without encountering a change. Only caught up in it do there seem to be changes, the unchanging fades into the background, never gone but one is reifying sights and sounds now, living a bodily life, come back to the unchanging any time. Or perhaps one wants to stay with it, not seeing one can never depart from it. Sometimes the changing mist over the fields wants one’s attention, the pale trees fading in and out of visibility, but the unchanging is still there. It is not even as if the absolute is preaching its salvation, nor writing off the relative as superficial. It is only tying oneself up in knots of the relative that seems to require the sword of the absolute to cut through. Then it can seem illusion, what need not seem illusion otherwise. One sows restriction about oneself all the time when engaging with the world, like some incurable newcomer who cannot shake the spectacle off, never seeming to be in a good position to grasp it as it is, in reasoning’s delay. We seem overwhelmed by deceptions we have brought on ourselves by traipsing onto the aridity of the intellect, the abandoned object of the human for ever nursing its small claims of happiness, waiting for the next while the last dims, the blinded beast of attachment guiding our every move, simply not knowing how to orient ourselves to the masses, easier to stampede when they do, graze when they do, left by the wayside to fend for ourselves should we move out of that rhythm, picked off by predators. We’re already fossils in the rock the moment we’re born, tourists of the distant past advertised as the very latest in Earth-bound attractions. We don’t see even the far future is all over, that’s why there is no choice, it’s all already done. But in the dream of it it never seems like madness unless you encroach on its edges, closer and closer to the abyss, then the wars start, though animals other than human are perpetually hunter and hunted, not seeming driven by illusions like humans to disguise that fact, mourning indeed when violence breaks out and personal tragedies impinge, laws only holding things at bay, a mask for what lies in wait. What is more astonishing is that for many there is relative peace for lengthy periods of time, as if that were the norm, as if one had mastered something of nature, the insanity of it we choose not to see when appreciating the beauty of it, the piranha under the boat swaying side to side in lazy motion, fingers trailing through the water, what a lovely day. I always think, why am I not more careful when I am snip-snipping with secateurs in the garden. The number of times fingernails have prevented slicing off the tip of a finger in the kitchen, as if sharp chopping knives were accounted for by evolution. The permanent scars of stupidity. Several crows are cawing in the field in a conversation I am invited to join in the hearing. There is nothing for me to say for them to hear, I am already back where I always was, the river of thought just the sound of the rushing water now, as it always was. I remember four little white egrets strutting through the shallows.
Disappearance asserts itself by acts of living in the idyll of not being known, underestimated when all one wants is to be known, a formidable absence seems like squandering the potential of fame, but as Marcus Aurelius said: ‘Listen how hollow are the echoes of applause in the auditorium.’ I don’t know what it is that steers one towards disappearance, is it the strange sensation of not being noticed? At first an odd horizon to consider, but you forget how hidden you are already, always being with yourself. You know you have taken yourself away, it is how far that is lost sight of. And then, many times it just seems you are fooling yourself, you’re right here, not hidden at all. And surely disappearance in the true sense stores up no joy in the prospect of being looked for, as if you’re going to be monitoring a vanishing, isn’t the point to lose any care for your old world? Yet it’s not about seeking a new world either. I rather suspect one day you’ve just disappeared, it was building up slowly, there was no decisive turn, for some reason people just can’t find you any more. Or you seem distant to people who know you well, as if you’ve already left and it’s just an empty shell talking. So much responsibility to ‘be here’ for people, they don’t realise what it costs you. Though this is only a way of speaking, as if being on Earth is just killing time. More and more, gone, but an appearance of remaining preserved. The light in your eyes, some say, is like the bright stars. You could have said you were from another civilisation, far far away. But there is not one that can take it at face value. Who can see beyond a year, let alone hundreds of thousands of years. It’s assumed to be a fantasy, it will not be taken seriously until one’s compatriots arrive, should they ever arrive, for all I know they’re already here. But I wonder, will they ever show themselves more widely? I’m beginning to doubt it, as I myself head into disappearance, as if it was overenthusiasm to expect intervention so soon, or visible intervention at least, as if I have jumped the gun. But I know nothing of it is a mistake, this chronicling of my time on Earth, it seems being largely unread at present is my safe passage, like completing a plan in hiding. I can’t want to be around when they start to take notice, oh no, there is nothing elegant in that. It is the largely invisible effects I’m after, that grow in darkness like seeds. When they begin to make their way into the open all ambition for recognition should have left me, a spirit unsapped by nostalgia for faded wishes.
The lustre of the past should be exhausted, done justice to but exhausted all the same, so it exerts no further hold, oneself an entirely new being and barely in the visible spectrum any more save as the memories of others projected upon the space I provide. One has not long for strategies of this kind, for all one has been mastering them one’s entire life. The true one without rank does not crave anonymity, that one is anonymity itself. There is a kind of miracle permeating even the ennui. Longer and longer spent in-between, in perfect lucidity.
One has forgotten progress, it was never needed, progress belongs to appearance, one already is what one is heading towards.
Delirium becomes a kind of life, one’s own genius paraded, a contrast to a life of challenges of the ordinary kind. Something else invoked, though one searches in vain for its traces after it has departed, the traces that there are seem like one has made it up, that these are better to have than doubts, which have no greater veracity. And yet, there is something strong left over, binding more threads to the rope with each new episode, a kind of strength almost impossible to realise one has, and it is better that way, it is better not to be conscious of one’s own heroism, nor even to think the heroic saturates a life flung away, standing apart from even that, impasse after impasse but no longer caring, the risks one took nothing now. The impenetrable void understands his own depths, for all he is quiet and reserved about it, as if protecting it from exposure. Despair seems tenuous, he no longer exhibits it and hardly grasps his former orientation towards it, though he would be the first to nod to it when expressed by others, it is not forgotten rather resolved, but without explanation. Something crumbled to dust. He lived under the sun and moon as a wild thing, spending more time observing insects than reading philosophy, no nostalgia for dreams.
For all he saw the far future, way way beyond his own maggots, he hardly looked minutes ahead in his own time, simply sat with the moment. There was hardly any time left for ‘doing’, which was why it always seemed a rush and running out when doing intervened. He knew he was simply maintaining an anchor for The Equilibrium. It didn’t trouble him what for, what off-world purpose he had undoubtedly committed himself to. This was the post, and that’s all there was to it. He spent the hours on a few pastimes, hardly descending into life, listening to the wind was plenty, like a tree he grew in the same spot. He didn’t fill himself with comparisons, what other people were doing, that way only an aching heart lies, he was lucky perhaps to have so solidly settled in seclusion. Though there was less to say about it now. He was no longer attempting to conform to some harsh idea, his strength to do was not sapped but rather channelled into not doing. He was not trying to take the pulse of an atrophied will, he was will in itself and that will rested in the sounds of the gulls. Equilibrium was an established fact, exceeding every dim memory of his last analysis. The civilisation he entertained in peripheral vision was sliding away, only stabilising on direct focus, and then only as conformity for those determined to stay in history. He preferred the wilderness, its lack of conditioning, the quietening calls upon him from towns and cities.
The ephemeral life passes like rapid centuries to a time traveller, millenniums without cease to arrive upon this shore, disturbing any belief in history because so ancient, where one has just come from, little more than dust. If I died, it was millennia ago.
We imagine something more substantial is required than the simple loss of the mind as dead ashes to the wind. We have taken root too strongly in a world without meaning.
Wet moss slowly overflowing the gaps between the paving stones vivid emerald green after rain. That’s the world I want to remember, the world I can remember now by simply noticing it as I glance down.
Disencumbered of our history, what are we? Exempt, it would seem, from any further consideration of it. An oarless rowing boat floating peacefully on a sunny afternoon in the middle of the lake, a cormorant alights on its prow. The vanity of so many things seems less. Even detachment is void, what is there to deceive one so again? The ancient curse has no bony knuckles to rap on the bright windowpane. Loathsome creation redeemed.
Once we realise that phantasms have no power, we have the wings to be awake. Open to the natural state, there is no complaint. The tiresome conflicts of petty men flourish only in the doubts about what unmasks them. If one has never been alive to such transformation, it is hard to be inspired to quit this sterile resignation. Indeed, this is the kind of ignorance delusion aims to produce, and we live only out of ignorance not even knowing what our hopes should produce, apart from infantile fantasies of happiness, clinging to thriving appearances becoming estranged to oneself, unable to move but not still. We endorse the rift of the abyss while never advancing close enough to know what it is. We incline to multiplicity at the expense of the singularity, but that can wait for ever if necessary, since eternity is the ocean that the wreckage of time floats in, never any distance away, the timeless countering every graspless moment constructing a life of semblances, an entertainment plucked from the stalk before it withers.
One is slowly winding down, even the trivial instances of daily life too much of an imposition, like Astavakra’s ‘master idler’ to whom even opening and closing the eyelids was just too much effort and thereby an affliction, yet happiness belongs to that one because hardly drawn any deeper into the world. It takes a while to see the idolatry involved in giving credence to any of the multiform things that instantly fill one’s field of view. It may just be a humble chair, but then one sees it is dusty, it needs dusting, it has demands just standing where it has always stood, better that they go ignored. We are made the victim of everything we see if we give it the least attention. But then thoughts start up and begin to plague us, as if we have made a grave mistake in ignoring the world, the mind’s world, let it be said, no wonder it takes it as a personal slight and browbeats us with it, as if you cannot live here if you are just going to let it fall into ruin. Fine then! I won’t live here! But any choice involved in that again too much effort, one hopes perhaps that the whole lot of it falls to ruin sooner rather than later. Yet on sunny days one pulls up a few weeds, tending to a bad back later as a result of it. Still, such spontaneous work less tainted by effort than deciding to do something. Few can understand our aversion, so them too one strikes out of one’s life. Never satisfied by being alone but not as bad as company. Our days and nights become unlivable, as if a punishment for believing the illusion of being born. Not that one does believe it, more the appalling sense of: Why still here? Murderers are more jolly. One is like a god tired of being one. The more powerful one is, the more costly the recognition of one’s insignificance. And yet, freeing also, from those big ideas. One has just lost sight of what to wallow in that would be appropriate at this stage of the game. Everything is undesirable. One is one’s own foul creature, one doesn’t need to imagine worse fates, they are all present for inspection. They haunt our otherwise easy forgetfulness, but never as anything sensible, just vague shivers down the spine when ruminating on what so devours us that we can never attain any full conviction in, little more than an offset for having it easy in the grand rejection of everything. Like a conjuror who has forgotten his tricks, we don’t know how to make this disappear before our very eyes. Is it because we don’t know what to replace it with? Why is an absence not good enough? It’s an absence already, anyone can see that. How can it possibly degenerate into something existing? It is not that the days are really a bewilderment, more a diluted nostalgia for something that never was but we gave more credence back then when it seemed we were enjoying life, though doubtless weren’t. But something will draw us out, it always does. A new aura for an old god, I’ve seen it many times, we never deprive our special gods for too long before granting them new powers to test out, tempting them back into the game against their better judgment, like a maniac is never too daunted to come forth.
I was listening to the heavy rain out the open window in the night. I heard a feminine spirit calling to me, I heard her voice in the sounds of the rain. She said her name was Cassandra. Cassandra from the rain.
No longer knowing the future, one pines nostalgically for cries into the wilderness, the reversal of fortunes reduced to a fleeting smile standing sheltering under a tree in a storm, a little island in the despair, a despair one doesn’t understand, some downfall being experienced one is at a loss to grasp. But the smile under the tree, weak though it may be, watching the slanting rain under the skirt dome of leaves not quite reaching the ground, just enough to see the rain but no-one about, seems enough to make contact once again with something not lost, even if the smile is rather mechanical, forced a little towards being heartfelt, standing there in peace somewhat, glad the rain is not yet lifting with its insistence to leave this spot, no longer the excuse for staying, just moments really yet grateful for the lull, equally not understood but feeling the change opening out into the unchanging, under the tree’s protection, like so many other times, but good to be surrounded by the pouring rain sheltered by the tree’s umbrella held out in kindness for a passing stranger, another stay of execution on a tyrannical day of anxieties preserving their vagueness so as to be impenetrable to solution, lazy in their overthrow of better times, like a prejudice against serenity, inelegantly collapsing it. But the tree and the rain says stay a while here with me, let it wash away, by the time you walk on it will be gone. And so I stand there watching the rain under the fringes of the leaves stretching out onto the field, hoping it doesn’t ease off yet a while, I know its gentle message. The resignation with the world a dream in need of a vision, overrun with scurrying doubts and fears, lending few favours, a deformity of insanity suffering from the capacity of desire to want just a little better, but not finding it there in its debilitating furnishings, yet the trees and the rain an old friend one can talk to, a charm of strength to grind the tribulations to a fine powder and blow them away. To want to be free is such as it is when tired of being oneself, constantly preparing for one’s end, stumbling through the walls of illusion, sighing for centuries for a more serious knowledge, mourning the lack of a true role, envisaging chaos provoking an ancient duty grotesque to testify against it on these trampled-down roads walked by the full weight of humanity, a world adrift hurling itself against us like a lost vigour tyranny growing like lichens but not in the least attractive like those unassuming beings painting the rocks with their modest company for lost souls, the easy seduction of the serene with not the least aim to bind us in chains, like a farewell that means it, a good friend to touch with the fingertips, as if only waiting for that and no more. Hard to explain such little things as precursors of peace, I only know I have seen it so many times, the anxious peregrinations stilled when offered a kindly hand by nature, simple nature, simplicity itself, as if to say what were you doing, believing those lies of a conditioned world? Close the eyelids a moment and be baptised by a new assurance, sustained in the dignity of small truths in no hurry to go anywhere, declining the honour of showy ideas always needing time to become something they are not nor can ever be right now. There is no need to feed this fire save by the straws of egoistic actions grovelling before altars of please, something better, more and more, let it burn up in its own inanity, this wedlock of tired temples, this gravedigger of philosophy never concluding anything useful, the tragic demand of too many empty hours, the debris for ever about one’s heels. The dribble-drabble of the wrong contemplative shapes, the void smashes it for you when you are ready. You have reached the edge of the world in spent senses.
The convictions of the lower depths can never be relied upon, the ground gives way to a cult of despair. The conviction it has always been this way is hard to fathom where it gets its power, what is so covering over as to remove access to the knowledge it is transitory? We give up on anything better for long periods, yet we don’t know what is provoking this outlook, ostensibly everything is the same and we vaguely remember it did not used to be so difficult to feel fine. Are we testing out a dour state for the sake of philosophy? Depression is like belonging to a fanatic sect of annihilationists dedicated to lopping off joys as they appear. We are the half-converted of an idol despising a belief we haven’t chosen, an answer that delivers nothing of sustenance, a collapse that no longer assists to clear away the old but only buries us in it. Is it a prophecy gone wrong, an intuition that rejects our abdication? Something wants to keep us here without explaining why. The power to ward it off deserts us, as if the times were indelibly stained to be this way a long time ago, just as were lighter happier times. The mechanism eludes. Going for a walk in the pouring rain, gazing at the reservoirs, a little time spent with a Canada goose, it seems a friend to elicit a little smile for a short while as it turns upside down on the water stretching its slender neck down to the bottom to feed on water weed, it doesn’t mind you and sails close. You thought it might be enough to banish the darkness of the day, its tail sticking out of the water, never fails to entertain. Something to remember too, later on, drying off at home. A little something in the day, the friend you have made of nature. All your life, that has been there. Just as you were about to say it is not enough, a pause. It is enough.
We are obliged to breathe, though oxygen is not necessary for the unchanging one, but we cannot easily see a way of doing without it, for all we know that one is not breathing. A strange nostalgia for life, though it is not ended yet it seems over, no longer lived, just going through the motions. Sentimentality for space-time, though tired of empty dreams. Behind events we see our madness. Space-time though, without events, seems an achievement, but what is it without events? We want to forsake history, a symptom of so many illusions. Looking far off into the future there is a purer vision. A kinder universe of absence. The beings of that time have learnt to stand back.
The singularity falls back on people to do its bidding without them ever knowing, for which it offers in return the lessons of life. When it hears us questioning ourselves about the insignificance of our fate, it wishes it could inform us that not one atom is out of place. Given centuries, we might see, but we are confounded by the commonplaces, rarely called to a higher view. The inescapability of our lives, yet in the blankness of thought there is nothing impinging, time is not imposing, space just the horizon of our rest.
Dazzled eyes of philosophy, despair of intellectualism, kindling for a fire that never comes. Bloodshot eyes trying to kick the habit of reasoning, the inadequate spectator, a bizarre assimilation of discoveries once thought to matter. A conjuring of the mind questions itself, as if its perplexity is genuine. One even stops wondering what despair can actually be. It feels like something from the past maintained only out of habit or having no other word for an inexplicable obsession one is unable to discard but no longer understands. One doesn’t like to take too much blame for it when it just seems the shape of the hours. Surely one can just leave it lying on a table like a parcel addressed to someone else. Come back to the unchanging, no longer consider these drifts of, supposedly, one’s own drama. In time there will be nothing to regard as one’s own life, just a wild staring into space hardly noticing the time go by. The fatal past unable to rouse buyers, a less baffled time the present, though not if one allows the invasion of the past.
Many ladybirds on the blackcurrant. How do they know that is their proper place? There is a fate hard to deny. Madness too is such. I am led to reconcile what I do not believe haunts me, resigned to some evasion bequeathed me, the inaction of greater times catches up and says there is no need to act now either. The shadows coating the room as the late afternoon sun slants in are always the same shadows.
It is hard to know what the vague disquiet is. The eagerness to embellish even the slightest feeling so as to know what it is, all while evading appearances. One compromises oneself by living, it is our surest failure. Why do the ants scurry about where I must walk? Why can’t I prompt the happiness I know is not denied me? Why always cast out into the wasteland? Did I intend to waste my days quite so much, do I care, do I even know for certain it is a waste? Is it not a training took from a thorn, to hardly see calamity any more because it is everywhere. The comforting disaster of one’s epitaph. Perhaps I forget how often I vanish into space and do not even know the century let alone the month or the day.
I have withdrawn to writing. I am in an outcast state. An outrage of a man. Never listening out for a crow cawing, but hearing one all the same. Losing all illusions then, one’s greatest friend out there in the fields. Wiping memories of immediate moments. As if drowsy to return to sleep, but staying awake all the same.
Walled up in his night, there is no crow awake to rescue him, he makes do with the braying of foxes, the rustles of a hedgehog in the undergrowth, best of all a storm. His confusions though seem less at night, his renunciations stronger, buried alive in the curtained room, yet awaiting his hour, the grand schemes of his interest.
He aspires to an accumulation of words suitable for one in exile, but doesn’t know any longer what reality he is protecting, for what grand vision he is bleeding, by his throes trying to free himself from echoes only. A literary automatism wells up, he hardly knows what it is saying until it is examined later, it might be hoped to find beautiful crystals of his despair, a mystic prose. Living permanently in an uprooted state, scaling by a formless foothold. Vigil after vigil, as days used to pass, a compulsion for the sake of escape from the synergies of Hell, the gleams of glory reinvigorating the inescapable, a song to himself of his fate, discarded wounds living the anonymous will, a mask of metaphysics to disguise the dread of all circumstances, and finally, the surrender to solitude wondering why he waited so long, as if his sufferings too mild to be a beggar of salvation. The lustre of this momentum often enough to fulfil. One moment it makes a mockery of a thousand prayers, as if certainly on a decline to defeat, the next it is a beacon to his ambition drawing him on.
I extemporise on the baffling, that prides itself on its supernatural character transfusing its veins, the fatigue of living in delirium, its lucid anti-logic, its strangulated miracles, uncertain whether to take up arms against it or join its cause, the promise of its god sitting in camouflage in close proximity. One tires supremely of endless deductions, the robot rabble of the future, the tyrannised tomorrows. I would rather follow in the footsteps of something entirely unknown, and put aside scrutinising my own victimhood with such enthusiasm, always knowing it is not my true nature, just a colouring book of misery thirsting after vengeance, a little cold-blooded entertainment in the purgatorial lull. How can I ever call myself a stranger of the singularity, it is but an act of expression in so frequent laying claim to it, as if to test out its stunted secrets. I know not what I gain by professing such ignorance, only that I feel called to do it. Gathering up the lost denizens of Hell, the demonic diaspora, to listen to a new oration. Have they not lived too long under old assumptions? Yet what have I to explain, I can barely express it to humans. Though not without trying, as you see. But the message is too multifaceted to be amenable to simple summary, and often seems little more than the sound of the wind or rain. Few hear it as I do, though always a chance that they might if I become ceaseless and with nowhere else to go.
The vantage point of the end now gives respite, when it used to feel too soon. I feel I have stayed here too long, yet wish I could have done more, been in favour of it more. The suffering of it is hard to place, it is not obvious as it is with some. One gives it the benefit of the doubt way past the doubt, since not knowing is not doubt. In other moods one surely knows, both for and against.
Not knowing preserves a trust in the graciousness it sometimes shows. Preserve the nothingness, those elongated moments only noticed when interrupted by a sudden noise. When no thought intruded, when no being seems to be there, no aspiration for anything, no doing of anything, not even aware of listening. The void presenting as no-one, not even thinking of things to be free of. One stands and sits and lies here more often that one thinks.
The effects of the world are felt, yet there is no world, just imagination. Apprehensive moods arise serving no other purpose than to persuade the world is real, since while caught up in that there is no chance to put aside these unworthy affairs. They demand submission with their clutter of world maintenance. Should the mind suspect it is losing its hold on the imaginary thinker, it switches on its charms, offers a joy like a worm on a hook. Again it is postponed, the fading away of the mind and the world it projects. It acts like a despot trying to keep hold of its power. Countless times one sees it, it is hard to say what finally convinces one to take a stand. Sheer weariness? The embarrassment one must feel when going back to a world one has already dismissed? How sure does one need to make it?
Certainly it has grown thin by now, this enticing illusion. And every indulgence of it is allowing a usurper to which there is no attraction at all, stripped of its beguiling guises. Yet one falls into the trap of a happier world time and time again, hardly even feeling it is a happier world, since soon the sense one has missed out on life by not allowing this earlier, a clown mesmerised by a spinning ball. There is a certain truth in the idea that one is only being thorough in one’s denunciation, but the years pile up their dissatisfaction hardly noticed, and still one has not thoroughly broken away. It’s the classic mistake to ignore that liberation is always now, one either falls into it right away or one is still toying with illusion, including the illusion that this has been going on for so long, which is only another way of embedding one deeper, in the moment, because it seems one is up against the product of decades when time does not even exist. So many tricks of the mind and its world, yet it’s nothing but hollow baubles. One can become more staunch to reject it as time goes on. One feels like a soiled angel to pick through these woes like an ordinary mortal. It is like absolute power and will tired of being crushed by ineffectual concerns, time an abuser titrating its cravings into a mirage. A simulant space perpetually drowning in the unstoppable march of an evolution that asked no-one’s consent, progress and growth little more than the decrepitude of ghosts populating history books. Civilisation a desert.
I live in another dimension, seemingly unable to put a stop to the stupidity in this one. For all I have the power the time has not arrived. I live in an obscurity, like a capsule, in a doomed landscape. I survive everything, whatever happens.
Many moments of my life are consigned to the abyss. Memory is mostly of not giving in. I have always felt their ruin, not my own. I resolve to imitate my better nature should it not come naturally. I hear the call of the abyss as consolation. The unendurable world shimmers away and at night there is a certain poise.
No-one had seen me in such a long time, I may as well have been far off in the mountains. I could only be a madman for so long, my weapons could only remain invisible for so long. What alarms I would set off in high places if they knew me as I was, instead I remained inconceivable, a blur to them, they were purposefully misdirected from what they had in their midst. I hardly know how it was achieved, I marvel at this more than anything, I don’t recall it as a skill I was able to exert but it must have been. As I was an enigma to them, I was also an enigma to myself, but of a different order. I had the strange good fortune to have come from the far future, but even that was not where I was truly from. I spoke of this many times in broad daylight, for the time in their future when they could not fail to believe it. Their lack of belief for now disguised me all about. But I brought with me something I was sent to do. I could not escape it, but I chose to hardly believe it myself. In this I was instructed. Many times I just thought I was wasting my time, like a night-watchman of the absurd. I wrote as a means of staying sane in this century, as if I caught flashes of the mission. But it was useless to expect the mechanism to lurch into action before its time. Was it a kind of preparation? I don’t know, probably little more than whiling away the hours in this cascade. Perhaps to provide an explanation for a time when I would have no time to explain.
Ephemeral humans seem like a lost obligation, and freedom in that. One’s vigil is no longer over humanity, but something far vaster. The tragedy called birth falls away for want of belief. Let those who believe it live in that world. Just a temporary affair. An attachment to soil. Surely one tires of remorse manufactured from causes that are nothing of one’s doing. One may as well believe one came out of a mist at the dawn of time. The perplexity of our origin is little more than the fever of a dead city. Tired too of enlarging his knowledge. The greatest philosopher is one who has forgotten how to think. No more pitched battles with empty concepts. Everything a mystery, including the breath he does not breathe. Tired of the tussle between mere ideas. This automatism tainted by hope. The intellectual comfort of rationalism less an inclination of truth and more a habit of the ages with their second-hand ideas. One can accommodate oneself to anything, nothing but transition without progress. Prefer the dry-dust path leading nowhere. Leave the fallen cities behind still standing in imagination. Less the dry-dust path will be trampled by a herd suddenly spooked into action, decaying graffiti on the walls the bellwether for isolated individuals: ‘Leave, this city has fallen.’
I expose a talent best not picked up by too many. The current of it is now rushing with a perilous force for those who can sense it. I do my best to disguise what I am exposing plainly, as if I can determine who reads these words by magick. I will not claim it, that you can decide for yourself. I do not talk of the neurosis of supposedly causing change in conformity with will, but rather something far more dynamic and unprecedented.
A nomad’s conditioning can handle the monotony of cold advance towards the bare horizon.
A metamorphosis of identity is what the wanderer is made of. The closer we come to a desolate landscape, the more our weaknesses fall away. The sighs and sobs inflicted on a lesser version addict like a narcotic. A lament falls silent.
Why does an illusion elicit blind obedience? The struggle of life, an artwork perhaps, even imposed upon those with no interest in art. Slaves in general to the mocking demon. Touched a nerve of the world in framing it and putting it on the wall. Who would want to preach to the genuflecting? I’d rather they stood without expectations.
The dung-heap heaves with indifference. Last words must come from on high, not a caricature of our abasement here in our entangled moments. One wanders, lost, seeking something better, the idea of all exiles is return, but the place one might have returned to never existed, such is the depth of the exile. On good days one understands this, and is not in hope of anything, the return is always to what never went away. A horror held at bay is vague. The speech of less-present relative annihilation provokes the sudden salvation of grace, like a suppressed spirit makes its way to the fore far more solid than the life of the cascade, as if one has chosen everything, even the beauty of destruction.
One perhaps tires of fleeing danger, yet it is only another sensation ripe with the hysteria of a ravaged time. Complacency the salt in my wounds, though this masquerade is easy enough to dispel. I would explain my ordeals, but they are over, as if I have devoured them whole hardly realising how hungry I was. The luminous trail seems populated looking ahead, but on reaching those places they are all abandoned. Still they induce the sense that something lies in wait, some impenetrable secret, as if I have hardly walked any distance as yet, no matter how far I go it always seems like that. There is no solace in having come a long way already, it only increases the dread there is nothing to find. Yet strangely it doesn’t seem a dead end, onward! onward!
Do I have the look of a vagrant? These ashes that coat my skin, I do not remember bathing my face and arms in them. Have I picked it up from the air like fine drizzle wets the clothes without noticing? Soon, the cascade may shift, I do not think this is somewhere I must stay too long. Something is undoing my footsteps in this obscure dust; the dust kicked up by the next step fills the footprint left by the last, as if by magical command.
Many years have gone by since I last remembered my days, now the days are all the same there is little to recall. I sometimes wonder whether this is a failure on my part, yet withdrawal into seclusion was surely one of the few things I did with any deliberation, for all there was also a sense of being forced into it, that there was no other choice, that there was no such thing as choice. I sometimes regret being unable to live, live like others, though it is little more than a sentimentality for the past and one’s youth, when the future seemed bright and great things were just around every corner. One forgets the despairs of those times, the break-ups, the losses, the very things that drove such a trek into solitude. I do not remember much, by which I mean I no longer delve too much into memories. I have written many down in books, perhaps to knowingly offset this present time of comparative blankness. I know I should value the blankness more than I do, since it throws me into the immediate, reduced to little more than hearing the calls of birds, sitting under trees. But there is perhaps something unfinished in mourning an uncertain loss, like being unable to move on, an affection maybe for a world I no longer regard as real that I am unable to explain to myself. Somehow not being able to embrace the void as well as I might, while simultaneously being so free and eassy with it I almost imagine I’m happy. No longer accruing widely varying experiences, something seems lacking, yet I know further experiences are not what I need, if I need anything. I am aware that the remnants of the world I allow may be planting a foot in a contradictory sphere and pulling me in two directions, and the contemplation of memories of lost times often evoked reading books where others recount their own memories, and I wonder, did I write about that myself? Have I written about enough of those things? The sense also of no going back, at least no going back without the awful feeling of having wasted so much of my life in giving up on life, so how can I do that? No, I need to find the new terrain suitable to a seclusion that has deepened, that in any case has only death on its horizon now. Though what is death but the falling away of the body? Should that concern me? Rather more concerned with what comes after. Consciousness may well be a plague we are better off without, yet I never find myself able to endorse this view fully. I know I am a face of the singularity, and that the singularity itself struggles with its own existence, and yet, seems the consummate master of it. All my work is to help the singularity come to terms with the shocking happenstance of its being. I do not take for granted it is a confident god, rather I appreciate it is aware of the sorrow it has apparently caused by its becoming conscious. Yet of course the doctrine that nothing ever happened has more appeal, for all ‘the world’ is the rebuttal of that, at least in the supposition it is real, which it obviously isn’t. Still, many believe in the world, and indeed even if you don’t believe in it it still appears able to exert a pull by this curious demonstration of a life, even if it is only hanging on by the slim thread of the worries one has been unable to expunge, rather than by the multiple desires one would still like to fulfil. Few indeed even find such a matter anything crossing their mind to consider. The answer seems plain to me at last: devotion to the singularity. To remind myself, as often as necessary, that I am of The Equilibrium. That these cascades of living times will neither defeat me nor absorb me.
And then, the utter simplicity of the unchanging, that not a crow’s caw can go by without reasserting it should it have momentarily slipped from view. And thus one pulls oneself out of the swamp of terrestrial life, exchanging nagging thoughts for transcendence, corporeal existence for formlessness, pledging oneself once again to immateriality and timelessness.
There is no transition, one is always that. It slips away though, or seems to, as the cascade overpowers.
Did I not enter seclusion to more ably study this? One allows the overpowering, to observe the falling away when it overpowers no longer, a thick ceiling of clouds penetrated by a ray of sunlight, asserting its transfiguration, allowed to live it intensely, no longer dumbfounded by dimensions, a reversal of power, the purity of starlight on a crystal-clear night infusing the geometry of the relative. Philosophical consciousness forged in the abyss, powerful, sweeping over the field of awareness and connecting with the passion of perceiving reality, troubles vanish, a calm sacred solemnity, a ship at last set sail.