Elephants and Gold

Beyond this drab procession of muffled voices

Beyond this world of flaws and false choices,

the paths created of black and blacker sands,

wildflowers growing of concrete land,

White clouds must hang low over river basins

Young children must linger over crystalline reflections

And wings must dance over beaming brown faces.

But in this place of wrath and tears,

a sickness hangs over the years.

Though I would not blaspheme my name

or give it up, or runaway

sometimes I think of brighter days…

And somewhere within my softening heart

where hope lies burrowed, but alert

I know bamboo forests speckle mountain scenes

and colors live, and grass is green

and this somewhere, where I long to be,

might also be awaiting me.

The internet makes all thought appear retrospective.  Impressions of speeches are written as if the event were some blurry afterthought, as opposed to a live update on a national reality. Our television experiences with reality were so much more colored and alive, for at the very least we were primarily witnesses to the event itself.  Now we are so often tempted to allow our “ticker tape” redactions of events to substitute the experience of them.

But the internet is a bundle of paradoxes, for it has also been a galvanizing force at the heart of revolutions.  More on this subject to come…

“What we see of things is things.
Why would we see one thing as being another?
Why is it that seeing and hearing would deceive us
If seeing and hearing are seeing and hearing?

The main thing is knowing how to see,
To know how to see without thinking,
To know how to see when you see,
And not think when you see
Or see when you think.

But this (poor us carrying a clothed soul!),
This takes deep study,
A learning to unlearn
And sequestration in freedom from that convent
Where the poets say the stars are the eternal brothers,
And flowers are penitent nuns who only live a day,
But where stars really aren’t anything but stars,
And flowers aren’t anything but flowers,
That being why I call them stars and flowers.”

By Fernando Pessoa

Boycott your medications, your addictions, your prescriptions, your obsessions, your collections, your afflictions.  Strip away the additives for a momentary thought experiment on purity.  For were it not for the various sedatives that explain away all of our behavioral abnormalities, would we find ourselves tranquil and undiluted at an absolute zero?  Somehow I fear, our addictions, our obsessions, our prescriptions address even deeper deficiencies, absences that only drastic lifestyle changes could address; I fear that perhaps it would reveal repressions and oppressions, anxieties and depressions, unhealthy nostalgias and shallow esteems.  I am afraid that the tools we use to address these problems are insufficient.  

And in every moment of relapse, every semi-pyschotic episode and existential crisis, we brush up against the idea that maybe it is this life itself, this linear work-oriented trajectory, this contained mentality, obsessive retention of details and calculations; maybe this lifestyle is a choice among others and maybe this fate is optional.  But the idea of changing everything, seeing the world through new eyes, is even more daunting than the side effects of our afflictions.  We continue by these thoughts, acknowledging in passing that certainly those escapes are out there, but that they would be a cowardly disavowal of what is certainly the only kind of life worth living.

Yet in reflection, our deep-seated nostalgia where we keep all the trinkets of hidden and simple loves, we recall that the world was once at our disposal, in a time when we allowed ourselves to recognize we didn’t know what it was.

I am infinitely affected by subtle changes in routine.  Every variation causes an almost chemical nostalgia for whatever nuance was replaced.  Was the cherry blossom outside my window once draped over by a blanket of snow?  Did the clouds drop in the horizon?  Does the wind carry new scents? 

I do not recall, I am left only knowing that something has been changed.  For even my memory is disturbed; warmer emotions cool the thought of darker moments and curiosity soon replaces the fear that haunted wherever it is I was last.

Whoever I was where I was last, is too folded over like origami-I am of a new perspective.  In spite of all my theories, the changes come like waves of nature’s whim.  In this moment, I am not intentional, even my thoughts are just the musings of a breeze that is singing through my open window.  A humbling meaninglessness wanders through the seasons, quiet like a listening child. 

A poem from Fernando Pessoa, the ghostwriter of my thoughts:

“I don’t know how many souls I have.

I’ve changed at every moment.

I always feel like a stranger.
I’ve never seen or found myself.
From being so much, I have only soul.
A man who has soul has no calm.
A man who sees is just what he sees.
A man who feels is not who he is.

Attentive to what I am and see,
I become them and stop being I.
Each of my dreams and each desire
Belongs to whoever had it, not me.
I am my own landscape,
I watch myself journey -
Various, mobile, and alone. 
Here where I am I can’t feel myself.

That’s why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading 
What I thought I felt. 
Rereading, I wonder: “Was that me?”
God knows, because he wrote it.” 
__________________________________________________
“Não sei quantas almas tenho.
Cada momento mudei.
Continuamente me estranho.
Nunca me vi nem achei.
De tanto ser, só tenho alma.
Quem tem alma não tem calma.
Quem vê é só o que vê.
Quem sente não é quem é.

Atento ao que sou e vejo,
Torno-me eles e não eu.
Cada meu sonho ou desejo,
É do que nasce, e não meu.
Sou minha própria paisagem,
Assisto à minha passagem,
Diverso, móbil e só. 
Não sei sentir-me onde estou.

Por isso, alheio, vou lendo
Como páginas, meu ser.
O que segue não prevendo,
O que passou a esquecer.
Noto à margem do que li
O que julguei que senti. 
Releio e digo, «Fui eu?»
Deus sabe, porque o escreveu.”