Today (in progress)

"O al - ter Duft aus Mär - - chen-zeit" ("Oh old fragance from mythical times": from "Pierrot lunaire" of Schönberg)


"I: Austrian passport issued by the Interior Ministry. Sworn certificate of nationality. Brown eyes. Blond hair, born in Klagenfurt, followed by several dates and profession, crossed out and amended twice, addresses, crossed out thrice, above of which can be read, written in calligraphy: residence at Ungargasse 6, Vienna III.

Time: Today

Place: Vienna.

The temporal index had left me pensive for good while, for it is almost impossible for me to say "Today" even though the people often say or, better yet, are ought to say "today" everyday; but if anybody tells me what he endeavours to do today - let alone tomorrow-, I do not react absentmindedly askance, as if it is often thought, but rather attentively, out of pure perplexity, !so hopeless is my relationship with that so-called "today"!, for I can only pass through such "today" in terrible pangs of agony and in a haste and, in the middle of this agony, to write or simply tell what is unfolding throughout; it would be then necessary to destroy immediately what is being written about today, such as the true letters are destroyed, crumpled and ultimately unsent, because insofar as they are from today, they won't make it to their final destination in any other today.

Whoever has written a frighteningly supplicant letter in order to subsequently tear and throw it away, will know better than anyone what I mean here by "today". And, who hasn't heard about those nearly illegible bank notes: "Come if you want and are able to, please. At five o'clock, at Cafe Landmann". Or telegrams such as these: "Please call me immediately full stop even today", or: "Today it is impossible".

In this fashion of things, "Today" is a word that only suicidal people should be permitted to use, but for all the rest it doesn't have absolutely any sense, it only serves to designate any other day, precisely today they are aware that, once again, they will have to work eight hours or take a free day for themselves, they know that they will go this or that way, will buy some other thing, will read a morning or an evening paper, they will drink a cup of coffee, they will surely forget about something, will turn up for an appointment, will have to ring up somebody, a day, in the course of which, in brief, something will have to happen or, better said, not too many things will happen.

I, on the other hand, after I pronounce "today", I begin to breath at intervals, suddenly I am possessed by that arrythmia that had been already diagnosed in an electrocardiography, and if the line in the graph does not grant the supposition that the real cause was my "today" - always new and oppresive -, I can put forward the evidence to the syndrom, redactable in voluble medical codes, the proof of something that precedes the crisis of my agony, and predisposes me to it, in accordance to what the medical specialists have always said and thought. But I am afraid that it is "today" what so badly drives me into the agony, what is in excess extravagant and pathetic, and that "today" will always remain fixed in my mind as such a pathological agony, until the very last breath." -Ingeborg Bachmann, "Malina"



I always knew that there had to be something utterly misgiving with this whole talk about "Today"; at the expense of a negation, it's a disease, or at best, the guilty resignation to a capital punishment, but I wasn't entirely sure about this until I read it in a novel, though the novel is sited in a far-away city where a friend of mine happens to live, I could enter on my own, it was the same cycle of asffixiation by-product of this eternal entanglement with today, for under normal circumstances -and all circumstances in life are normal unless it's a case of love, the gesture of time is always Janus-faced, and contemplation is not tolerated, even in unsual cases of uncalled-for romance, starting into for too long is a common form of molestation. Living today, everyday, is tantamount to never ever sleeping, thus the clean surface of the present is always edgy, only interrupted by the absurdity of daydreaming, while yet bereft of sleep; ten long years and yet not one single rapture of the eyelid into the movement of the hours. Not for a single moment though, it occurred to me that I was dying, except for my behaviour, erratic, always signaling that I was ought to conquer the world down and above, even if it meant to give up on peace or temporary cease-fire, everything had to be won and then lost in one and the same day. The slightest breach in my sound protocol of belligerence would amount not only to negligence on my part but to failure, retreat and total defeat. And, since I adamantly refused to be consoled in any way, there were only so many ways in which the state of panic could be driven away - embalming of healthy living human beings, being one of them. Embalmed in a cavas I had myself chosen but for a more splendid occasion, like that of a technically possible victory. The past, even the most immediate whim, was never granted a moment of rest, being all too frightened by forgetfulness, so that it was ought to be carved out with scalpel, mummified, nullified, hence conserved intact, a thousand and one years before the time was ripe, abandoned, ownerless somewhere, exposed as the celebrated prize of a meticulous and carefully planned robbery. The morning I returned to the plaza, I had felt less ailing than usual, free of guilt, if anything only because because I was almost entirely deprived of sleep and not fully committed to the destruction of the hours that lay ahead, they seemed so vague and vacuous, almost soundless and continuous, another hopeless eternity, like a whole century of peace. There I sat, idly, reading Mrs. Dalloway, laughing with the belly button but without the gestures of the mouth, and I sat at the same table, in the same position, with the same scarf, but only a few hours earlier, in the solid but futile attempt to catch one simple glance of his, to feel again the warm finger accidentally falling upon my wrist; yet I manage to feel nothing, the well of the vision had dried, because once I've put it down in writing, it's all been completely forgotten, as if it had been a mass burial for my armies. Perhaps I'm not even chasing after the vision, but just making sure that it doesn't haunt me. It's so fragile, on a revel, at the bank of a river, melted into the air of other ages, already invisible. I no longer capture the essence, all the images are seizeable; all the trees at the same height, the order of the bricks and stone, the vendors in their tents, black doves, ponds of mud and rainfall, the Holiday mood in the pace of the streetwalkers, a timid drizzle stepping on my shoe, especially the slow speed of everything, there seems to be just too much time available now. There's still the weak hesitation of feigned visions, the terrifying sensuality of remembering at all. The way we live now, the way we live today.

Youth

After several years he had decided to come out of the isolation in which he had placed himself not so much out of faith as it was the natural consequence of disappointment, not that he had not experienced moments of happiness, but there was something fundamentally wrong about laughter in his particular case, for it was not that he wasn't sincere but more of a question of an absurd relationship between time and his skin - his laughter had never been young. So young he was when he looked into the mirror and in spite of three delicate lines of expression hanging almost artificially slightly above the eyebrows and walking gently into the sideburns, there was a very kind and particular type of youth in him; his youth however was not beautiful as much as it was disturbing, for it was resembling more a peace treaty than actual adulthood - it might have been written nearly three decades ago but in spite of maintaining the status quo of life as such, the biology of politics and geography so to say, not even the simplest words had been inspected with care, the paper appeared such as a new morning dawning from Iceland into Cape Town at noon time, the text remained hidden, unexplored and ever so mysterious. There was nothing he could do in order to change the sorry situation that he was becoming younger and younger, so that in his isolation he tried out the wisest recipes for ageing: Overconsumption of life as such, deprivation of food and sleep, intense fits of crying and mourning, he pretended that he could no longer read books and that life, in the brutal intensity of jolts was far worthier than scholarly mustiness; the repetitive cycles of useless entertainment and feigned ignorance did take a toll on him after many a year, perhaps half a decade even, and those were not many years after all, but in the vice of youth they had seemed to stretch into a whole century. As if a magic elixir protected him from this crucial passage of time, he was still younger than he had ever been, and of course, even after writing a whole novel that would give him fame, he had accumulated no more than three readers and his material belongings were infinitely less than those of a boy even half his age; he did not possess any wealth and in his ownership one could not find even one single suitcase but a very modest assortment of clothes that he tucked into a plastic bag with a scrapbook and a pen - it was not that he was poor but that he had no interest in life unless it stood for the fulfillment of a certain corruption of death. This had nothing to do with a death wish as such but with wild mockeries, how a corpse refuses to scorch even after hours under the flame, the way nothing survives the burning down of a manor, other than an immaculate leaf floating on a little pond of mud that couldn't be consumed even by the acid water of leaking fuel.

But he had had enough with the isolation once he had lost interest in the study of philosophy, and began to admire after his own fashion, the ways of the people in the earth, but it was not that he loved their ways as such, for which he could show nothing but utter contempt, he admired the possibilities of art that they expressed and at this his cruelty was seamless and could easily blend in with either mental disease or immaturity. The people, he thought, often while journeying to the libraries and the cemeteries, were like little works of art, and it is not that he despised works of art as such but that he was terribly uncomfortable with the idea of perdurability that pervaded all the classical art he had once admired, no, but the idea of art had changed through the years during which he had not made part of the world and he began to develop a certain sensibility for the transience of life and the negation of art as supreme categories of representation. The kind of art that would consume itself shortly but definitely, as if there could be no possibility whatsoever to produce art as artifacts but that even in the modern age, the work of art could not be permitted to survive even for a moment, the pretensions of its own disclosure. This, however, people found very disturbing and often confused with an eternal inclination for romance, though, the moment the work of art embodied in the hands and the limbs of a certain person failed to deliver this timeless truth, it was set on fire and while not altogether forgotten, immediately condemned to the paper. How horrible this death is ought to be, to have your body lined up in a single and nude sheet of paper and then feel the ink choke you and drown you with exact precision, first puncturing the eyes and then continuing into the mouth and the throat, then chopping the limbs, emasculating before the very end and at long last embalming the skull onto the paper and making the leftovers of the skin vanish into the most beautiful metaphors of heaven and water, power and might, logic and sense, without one single scene of love - there were scenes of love, but they were never verbal and no more than a tense and very tortured gesture in the lips or the hands was permitted to settle around the corners, as if nearness, physical nearness as such, were not only sinful but insufficient an effort to stand for beauty. This writing, though beautiful, was not learnt, and thus could, deep down, be nothing but childish, and while it is not true that fairy tales are childish, those long pages, always cut at the very end and never dotting one single line or expression in the sides or the reverse, as if written with absolute scientific precision, were both fairy tales and childish. It did not leave one single moment to breathe or a blank space to be free, the tension was such a constraint on the effect that a reader had impressed upon himself, so that one single hour after he had written it out, he was ready to dispose an entire novel.

Coming out into the world in order to live intensely was something too much dangerous and perhaps even perverse, for there was nothing that could survive there, life least of all and certainly never one single instance of time as such, but it was a necessary step in order to break out of that ill model of love and art, which after its own fashion was only the reverse dialectics of the very same classical art that he had condemned; there had to come a moment, even at the expense of never growing old, when one had to learn how to think or write abstractly because in reality, the ever so constant murder of a large number of men and women onto sheets of paper had taxed his feelings and while he was by no means incapable of love, besides a little charm and a secretive but yet too obvious fascination, it was only this dread and the fear of his own murderous intentions, what he could offer instead of passion. He spent a few years thinking how it would be possible to write abstractly, without stealing from people, without historical perversion for which one would have to atone later on, perhaps into old age, spending yet a thousand days correcting manuscripts in order to let the truth about these earthly men, surface at last. Yet he was still becoming younger and younger, perhaps the body reacted differently to both erotic insinuation and to intoxication, but people still saw him as being completely childish, unable to outgrow some very simple fantasies. There were moments of pleasure, undeniably, he let himself be wrapped by them and soaked into their fluids, they were not making him older or wiser, like he had been at the age of sixteen when he understood the world so completely, when philosophy was still readable and love, definitely scary but possible, like religion. Abandoning the idea of wisdom however, is an entirely modern gesture, just like the romantic silence in his books, and perhaps that is why it made sense to step out of vindication. What had been once impossible, to walk away on the crucial moments of life, instead of setting them up as a trap for oneself, to drown in them as if in a pond until the point of exhaustion, this hadn't become in anyway easier, but it was no longer deadly; the present could be lost in this exercise, and art as such, hadn't gained any distance from the hand, however, the momentum hadn't been lost; the stakes for fear were in an all-time high, he could be unnerved anytime, but as it happened with dreams, the eternity of this suffocating moments was bland and weak before the mysteries of time, and this is the only way in which the obsession for trasience could possibly make sense - the deliberately modern idea that beauty is not to be kept but destroyed and irascibly transformed. Perhaps he was already somewhat older then, he just needed to prove it.

Jotting down a dream... (Part II)

"For some reason, Michael Cunnigham's "The Hours" is still at the top of my preferences on how modern writing should be made to conversate with literature. To some people it appears that Virginia Woolf's crucial demands on literature were nowhere radical, but I think this has to do with the fact that they already forgot that politics is not literature and that literature must never leave the domain of art." -A.

"I remember one morning, getting up down, there was such a sense of possibility, you remember? that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself, this is the beginning of happiness, this is where it starts, and of course there will always be more; it never occured to me it wasn't the beginning, it was happiness, it was the moment, right there." -Clarissa Vaughan

The dream takes place again but it does not suffocate, as if the space had changed and no longer stretched itself to match the previous night or the callousness of a morning to follow, it could have happened anywhere, hadn't the yellow light covered with galactic dust, unmistakably made me stood by the gates of Jerusalem, or at least, significantly near, so that I could smell the frankincense blending in with the thyme, the chickpeas and the mint leaves learning how to swim in the burning scorches of the turbid waters that suddenly, at the call for noon prayers in yet a thousand mosques, is miraculously turned into fresh tea. Not everything had been beautiful then or even readily available to understanding, the poetic fixation on the index of the past gave free way to different shapes of the present to assemble themselves comfortably upon the sand, being infinitely more frightened by the solid immutability of the stone than by the fragile syncope of the sand - It seemed as if the stone could live forever, or even for yet another thousand years, which is much longer than forever, and how sorry it would be for one lone person to feel the very same, for a whole suffocating eternity of time. Other symptoms were also sensual more than they were loving, the inert death of the birds was felt more intensely than the jolts in the city and the noisy steps of the madman, trying to find a way back from the light, as if it were only in caves that men are allowed their privatemost thoughts; the gardens, it seems, and the flowers in the spring, the wadis and the waterfalls, the hanging ivies and the peaceful benches, they only seem to add another imprecation in the list of unfulfilled miracles, of mere facts of the world, to uphold against god. The sand is less threatening, more receptive to the music, it could be confused with sheets of paper and with the gown of a woman chasing after planes in the sky instead of picking up the shells - that's the kind of ambitions she's got.

Once again I fail to remember anything of particular importance whilst jotting down the dream, but its importance seems ever so much less at the moment of facing the nudity of the paper than the vices of the memory, trying to re-arrange every little thing in the world in order to adjust to the cruel demands of the dream itself; quite happy it had been, I think, and all the more unimportant not because of its simplest joys but because of its most absolute and reckless incompatibility with the present, manifold times richer and brighter, lustful and intense, slightly murderous like an alphabet, useless for poetry and for fairy tales, not systematically different altogether from the cyphered code to be seen in the neon-lightened boards at the train stations while not incompatible with the languages of science, taken advantage of by dreamers, philosophers and astronauts alike. The dream appeared as a peacefulmost consolation, one single moment of security, one single moment of safety from the rush of the waters toward the nothingness, flowing on and on, in circles and cycles, frantically, passively angered, but smooth and powerless. Perhaps the remembrance of the madness, nowhere close to a religious experience, would be all the more comforting, the loud screams of the lovers and the stealth escape from the movement of lips and limbs, the stalls of the artisans in a cold night framing the transport lines with such delicate and formless accuracy and at long last, the departure, the cruelties typical of intense emotions, the silence of a telephone, and that beautiful vision; not sure whether imagined or not, of the voice in the other end trying to pacify my exasperation while pissing on myself with one hand against a painted wall and smoking with the other, the smoke patting me heartily on the back and my eyes, darkened by all too common poisons, searching for a moment of lust, a little distraction, a minute of fame or shame, anything that could make the supreme guilt by-product of helpless passion, easier to tamper or more difficult to enshrine.

There's no comfort in this though... But the dream, always the dream, appears like a fickle, watered down and weak before the imponent hours, and the hours before, the crucial waiting and the geographical patience of those places, where we had been once happy. The dreams were nothing unique insofar as they were static, inept and sterile in a certain way; perhaps they give us some information about anything that we've taken happiness to be after all, a little shopping boulevard in lieu of heaven, something very bland and pathetic, and why shouldn't it be the reason for which we're not granted a place in heaven, so little did we want from the earth, so small and indistinguishable from misery our comfort zone had been. But the hours, the hours of vigilance, they were somewhat lost in the sobriety of the day; that's something I can't handle too well, the sight of all those many colors, the skin of the enemy, always so fresh and untainted, this is what eternity must look like - Just one single day in town, without night and without sleep, without poison but also without rest, the continuity of it all, the bus lines, that moment that you thought then while you waited, behind the spotless white table, shaking from the fear, that moment that you thought, could change your life in less than a moment, arm you with wings and set you on a flight at the expense of the heavy weight of your socks, and yet it passed, perhaps you missed it, perhaps that's when the world world began anew. Yet the helpless realization that it was just one another fraction of time, one hour less of sun for your eyelids and the steady walk toward the grave, nothing else but that. How unsinful and irrelevant, apparently useless for the pen, if you know how to use one, otherwise easy to forget, prosperous as it had been, the view from the glasswindow, the most intimate desire to shipwreck; perhaps a bit of a death wish could have added one centimeter of height to the marshmallow stairway that was supposed to lift that moment up into heaven, you would have done anything to avoid it, let go of your life or kill a poet in the story perhaps so that the others might live and forget altogether - because poets can't, it might well be that they do no good to write or speak, but forget, they can not . But it wasn't anything like that, it was like any other day - instead of heading for heaven, you stood on a line, to enter the ice skating ring, in that horrible plaza, told more than a few lies and then disappeared with your soul, wondering all the time, why on earth would you bring such a heavy suitcase to a skating ring, on a sunny day in a colorful trope, how befouled you were, so that instead of carrying it to heaven, you abandoned the suitcase in a dream.

Since heaven is supposed to look a lot like dreams, thus, it was an obvious choice, especially at night, when the sky is no longer visible and heaven stands nearer as the cool air bathes the ankles and the wrists, not because heaven is supposed to be cold but for more visual reasons, as the empty streets and the cold sounds inundate the images of the day and make then appear overflown with a certain abandonment to lust. I am not sure if it was lucidity what was being lost, but there were these voices, they played instruments for me, everyone was so beautiful then, beautiful and absent, untouchable and I was just an elf, being soothed by the piano, unable to catch one simple glimpse of living person or thing, they were inert objects, dancing like marionettes, without bleeding or exhaustion, they were tireless in their tune and all the songs did I know, like never before, I wouldn't be bothered by their inhumanity and their bones of coal and their flesh of cloth, I danced amidst them like a recently crowned king in a lonely planet of his own throwing a parade for the sun. There was this pain too, dancing with me all along and I knew he had been there since the moment of defeat, he wouldn't let me cry this time because the rules between us were very clear; we could only cry out of beauty but never because of ugliness, and since he didn't leave me for a single moment of that night or the morning after, I was unable to weep and the only stance of mourning had to be bled into an empty page, that in itself refused to soak in the blood and I had to watch it, for a whole week, dancing around the edges of the paper, changing from black into magenta and then sometimes cerulean and purple and grey. I had to smear it on my body after bathing in a river of the size of a bathroom, together with my parfum so that I could go on living, and if it was an issue of going on living or not, it was not because of the pain but merely out of embarrassment. That's how I slipped into the dream, in the early morning as I tried to avoid the reminders of the sun, the most basic knowledge, the knowledge that it had been just another day and never a work of art or a moment of truth; those moments remained hidden, messianically, often forgotten and seldom unchanged, they were more like the stone and less like the sand, you wouldn't realize that the garden had changed into a palace until you have already crossed the threshold.

The preference over the dream lies precisely on the fact that the imagination is still at work here and you might comfort yourself in thinking that it is much more powerful than reality and that it plays no role whatsoever in configurating those moments of the day that powerfully appear and vanish at the same time, that reality is a realm independent from supplications and from wonder, you're completely powerless in it and therefore infinitely innocent. They are not in the past, the dreams, they never happened, they are not looking into the future but merely speak to the denizen of the present, they offer him a certain weak salvation that he couldn't otherwise attain because nothing can be saved from the present, not even the future or the past, without the most reckless and courageous risk to lost the present itself. In jotting down a dream, this is exactly what happens, the dream is too innocent and unharmed, boring to say the least and completely at peace with itself, so much in contentment that you're even permitted to glance into yourself during a moment of happiness, so that perhaps they become important only once you're dead, but can't be jotted down properly when you're a writer, or a storyteller or an epistolar confessor. There's no fear in writing down a dream, in sharing, there's no use to art, for itself the dream could pass as a masquerade for the kind of art practiced by poets and philosophers, it survives on a diet of abstractions and eternities for sale, and when there's no fear, the poet is unable to find out anything about himself or the beloved one or the world as such whilst he is trying to describe the old oak tree inside the bedroom and above the table, using words that would be adequate only to describe the madness of a lake or the still of a man. When you, as a writer, live haunted by fear, you're ought to re-invent yourself in order to write and therefore to "invent" writing, to create styles discreet enough to safeguard the intimate privacy of your pickpocketting activities on earth, so to say, to re-translate life into another sort of life that might be understandable to you as a human person and therefore to others. It is fortunate though, that it was such an useless happy dream because the asffixiating hours, those that you keep silent about, they surface on their own, slit your throat and leave you defenseless, without you even realizing that they passed.

"Still she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed? Even if we're further gone than Richard; even if we're fleshless, blazing with lesions, shitting in the sheets; still we want desperately to live. It has to do with all this, she thinks... It seems that at that moment she began to inhabit the world; to understand the promises implied by an order larger than human happiness, though it contained human happiness along with every other emotion". -Michael Cunningham

Letter to F.

"Do other people have moments of peace and quiet? I'd really like to know the answer to that question" -W. Benjamin

"You can't have peace in life by avoiding life" -V. Woolf

It's been a long time since I last received a letter so beautiful as yours, thus, I felt ought to send you a letter in the proper sense of the word, something that could contain in a certain manner the gesticulation typical of a person addressed in such a personal manner, when he reads such a letter. For a long time now, I haven't been writing properly, at best, I've written notes and of course letters, to the people who deserve my intimatemost affections. There's something paralyzing about the times, the deadly effects of the present, that when free from the past, presses against your chest like a knife, philosophers would call this "absolute time", or even better, "Jetztzeit"; perhaps it is in the mood of philosophy, or in its obligation at least, to live always in the present, do you remember Etienne Gilson? He used to say that a man of 70 years might have so much to tell about himself but that if he's been a philosopher his whole life, he realizes to his own astonishment, that he's got no past. I've spent nearly the whole year in a sort of procrastination or avoidance if you want to use the French philosophical jargon, trying not to confine myself to the constrictions of something as cruel as philosophy; this is to no avail... I remember now how a former teacher of mine used to say that in philosophy what really matters is the choice, that once you choose yourself for that, you're as good a philosopher as you can ever become, you can learn how to go through the material, write conferencies, give lectures, etc. but the choice is somewhat stable. Something like this happens to me often, my journeys through the world are more like sightseeing, like being spectator more than they're an actual settling down. My book doesn't advance much, nor does my thesis, but somehow I feel I'm reaching a point in which this becomes serious business and not just one another avoidance of life situations.

I'm delighted with what I hear about your stay in Berlin, I would think there can be no better choice of a place for art, at least for the kind of art that feels itself to be still growing and not yet ripe. There are these lessons about one's age and position in the world (not only personal but also from the perspective of world history as such) that can be easily learned in Berlin, and in the whole of Germany, but certainly Berlin is a great example, you see, in Berlin it's helpless to feel young, or at least in other cases, that one's being given a second chance, a second chance to live in the most extreme manner, so to say, free from boundaries. Berlin reminds people like you and me that in a way we're still in the very first childhood and that it is only now that life is beginning to fall into place at long last or for a first time; something that is impossible to feel in Bogota where somehow life just goes on too quickly and unmolested by the facts of the world, a place so young and old that you and me in it, are older rather than younger, and then you see the people around you, everything seems right in the world to them, nothing appears to have done to them injustice, at least not undeservingly, like the Christian saints would put it. It's so beautiful to feel one can still be carefree, which is this contradictory feeling I have in Europe all the time, of never feeling my age at all, being infinitely younger than I am, like a child, at the same time that glamorously older, as old as God, yet never in one's own shoes. Perhaps failing is something that has to do much with being young but that can be done at any age, you see, if I'm correct, I think this month is already 9 years since I first met you, and yet in spite of everything one's still allowed to fail in the exact same way. Heinrich Bluecher, the husband of Arendt, used to tell his philosophy student that there are only two things one needs to know about philosophy: That you can only succeed in this, but this also means, that this is the only thing in which you can fail, and the only thing in which you can fail.

Remember what Benjamin said about Kafka: That any acquaintance with his literary production makes you realize that he was a failure as a writer. There's no way in which one can not fail in producing art or thought, because irrespective of the cruelty of aesthetics, beauty is lagging behind always in life and to life, it's only observable in the moment when you no longer possess, that's why the "academic studies" of beauty are always in such an inferior position like those "studies of time", in the moment you're participating in beauty or in time, you can no longer study it, you are ought to lose it in order to become an observator. Perhaps the same applies to love, which is so completely intertwined with both beauty and time. The youth and beauty of Berlin has to do perhaps with this seamless sense of unpretentious beauty, of chaos, the art of awful things, so unlike the cathedrals and the beautiful pathways in the stone, sometimes while living in Berlin you begin to imagine that there's not one single tree in the world, and then suddenly, a forest, then you begin to imagine there's not one single building in the world, and then suddenly, a gate, history strikes again. It turns out that if you're going back to the Fourth Reich in March to begin anew your German courses, for the first time in a long time, we might be in the same country at the same time and perhaps once again, as it's always been, in the same frame of mind. The weather in Germany as you know is as punctual as the traffic, thus, you're not in for much of a surprise, but one thing is clear, it's a place for love, good and bad, a place for creation, good and bad, perhaps the whole world began from there, what do you know. I'm now as I often am, without a single moment of peace and quiet, going through the day as if trying to conquer one giant wave, and then another and when you're about to reach the peak of the chiaroscuro in the morning tide, there's yet another wave. I'm looking at this as a period in which I'm only studying life, as if such a thing could be studied, but more than that, I'm very afraid of writing, thus I'm confined to very short pieces at a time, usually writing anonymously for people who meant the world to me, even if just for some hours, this is one of the advantage of being young again, you live out of fragments, no longer counting the days and the hours, thinking that the years are not really flying sidewards.

It's a remedy against this mortal despair. To feel like life hasnt started yet, like it's all the time starting, and yet once again, over and over. I'm trying to find out what it means to live without fear, the concept is totally absurd to me perhaps only because it's nothing of a concept but something so absolutely simple and concrete that can't be grasped without a certain dose of the irrational. I'm glad to find out that you've found love, or better, that it's found you, and well, no better place you've chosen for yourself I think; as for me, I felt a turbulent tide of love in the past weeks since my arrival in Bogota with someone who for a change, happens to live in Germany, you would like him very much, soft spoken and talkative, sophisicated but not demonically intelligent, therefore manageable, not too glamorous and not ordinary altogether. But once again, like in my four or five instances of love, a total failure, perhaps the enamourement might not have to do so much with the person as it does with the impossibility, with the endless pleasure of an even higher hilltop. I however felt more alive than I did in previous years, suffocated by this warm air that grew faster than the air outside so that the chemical imbalance beings to asffixiate up to a point in which you begin to let go. I can't deny that I felt sorry about this but at the very least I'm able to write again. As you know well, Bogota chokes me, it's a deadly landscape for anything that has to do with me, I feel like I'm not given a single moment to stop, rest, think, consider, analyse, etc., and therefore my words and my deeds become erratic, dumb and completely lacking in horizons, I should learn my lesson at last and never come back, perhaps one day I'll be strong enough to do that. Boxes are not a bad metaphor for what it means to be here, always moving boxes, from one head to another, just right now my aunt passed by and told me I'm a fucking authistic child, and well, this is perhaps not a lie. As you know, I have a lot of boxes, spread through different continents, houses, men, etc. Like a friend of mine said to me in a metaphor not without the rudest irony: "You're like the Coco Chanel of homosexuals and intellectuals. Coco Chanel was a master, a master in everything, there was one only thing that could unnerve her and paralyze her, this thing was love".

Fondly,

A.

Deadly gifts of God - מתן מוות ויהונתן

How false can a poem really be? That is the question that he asked himself at the moment of an intuitive observation, it was not only that he was a complete inept in the description of landscapes - with the sole exception of heaven; but also that the addressee of the poem had vanished from sight and had packed his tongue inside the memory of another man, who himself one day packed in a suitcase a few thousand days and set to sail through the land. Alcohol does not mix well with both anger and atonement, especially when the boat is boarded only by strangers and the waters more turbulent than the womb of the whale. Perhaps it was not even necessary to have gone that far, with one hour it should have sufficed, for the whole of eternity to break into tears and bow to the unpretentious but vigilant watch of that night, on a 15th of December, in a big city, in that far-away land, even though that from my country, all lands are far away and reachable only at the gun point of exile. Ambition however had won the day, followed by wrath, and then shipwreck, and while those sins, even the shipwreck, are not punishable by the laws of man, the fateful decree of the deity was to drown in a glass full of tears, a glass so small than not even one finger of the hand would fit in without spilling the precious liquid. What a strange punishment for a single fit of rage, he would think for himself, but he wasn't altogether surprised, whole kingdoms had been lost for much less, one single sacrifice bought at the wrong hour or a peg of wheat protruding out of a spotless altar would have been enough to bring the plague to entire cities. How was he supposed to drown inside the little glass? One had heard stories about parents asking their children to drown in a little pond in the street on the Day of the Atonement, or even worse, to choose at gun point which one of his two children should be not sacrificed but gunned down and thrown into a pit, but a little glass? What was really the science behind it all? After all he had cried for a whole night with a wounded leg in a deserted street that once had seemed beautiful and pleasurable, and yet, still it wouldn't fit into the glass. But he had been entirely mistaken all the way, on the first night, even during the first hour, when he first tasted that infinite joy from the open-edged glass, he had already choked, and that's why he saw everything in such glee, he had already crossed the threshold and condemned himself, in that sense, his salvation was ascertained but it was revoked in the moment he decided to slam in the face of his own gift of God, an earthly and mundane gift, and not because it was a gift, but because he had been self-righteous, thinking that with only one simple gift, he would be able to win the favours of that soft-spoken devil, oblivious of the fact that even at the expense of a hundred calves, the city was meant to be destroyed anyway. He has drowned already in the first hour, everything else was just a post-mortem effect, another consequence of heaven. The only lesson to be learnt is that you can't bribe the deadly gifts of God, otherwise they wouldn't be given to you in the first place. Thus, the poem was not false, even though it was not beautiful, only because the moment of the possession, had already passed.

1.57

I am letting

the image disappear

into the fickle

rain

emptied

out of a glass

erratic

in me

violent

angered

Twice

an unlikely choice

of number

for solitude

instead

disfigured

the sight

that already forgot

the cruelty

of the eye

Painless

this time

a morning

of sun

in the stomach

of the pilgrim

imagined

the words

of the stranger

wayfarer

Innocent

but merciless

forgetful

the hour

undeadly

inebriated

the morning

that wept

the silence

without the dance

Jotting down a dream...

To M., K., J.

"Quietly work through the night and advance in the direction of your purest white dreams..." -M.

"You're the Coco Chanel of homosexuals, I think. Coco Chanel was a master, the only thing that could unnerve her... was love..." -M.

"A hundred-and-thirty five years ago Rahel Varnhagen jotted down the following dream: she had died and gone to heaven, together with her friends Bettina von Arnim and Caroline von Humboldt. To relieve themselves of the burdens they had acquired in their lives, the three friends assigned themselves the task of inquiring into the worst things they had experienced. Rahel thus asked: Did you know disappointed love? The two other women broke into tears, and all three thus relieved this burden from their hearts. Rahel asked further: Did you know disloyalty? Sickness? Worry? Anxiousness? Each time the women said yes, they cried, and again all the three were relieved of their burdens. Finally Rahel asked: Did you know disgrace? As soon as this word had been spoken, there was a hushed silence, and the two friends took their distance from Rahel and looked at her in a strange and disturbed manner. Then did Rahel know that she was entirely alone and that this burden could not be taken away from her heart. And then she awoke". -Hannah Arendt, "Juden in der Welt von Gestern: Anlaesslich Stefan Zweig", in "Sechs Essays", 1948

As I awoke from that only night of undisappointed love, a stench I don't remember of what, hovered over my lips and my eyes, it could have been a dream, had it not been repeated twice and with the same consequences; a maddening intoxication of the senses that danced with a tune of beauty and loss, of its own accord, so that in spite of myself, the night had not been the dream and the dream had not been the morning that followed from the merciless command of time and solitude, to board a train on your own armed with nothing but images that only vaguely fit the splattered light casted by the stars above along the timid drops of tears falling as black rain into the transparent asphalt that grew faster than the distance and with the same slow movement of abandonment, a musical chiaroscuro, perhaps dotted on a piano in the absence of a possible spectator, other than the good God, picking up from the stacks of hay, the sins committed that day and bringing them back to heaven to cleanse them from conceitedness and throw them back into the world, the morning after that, fresh as a breeze, into the hands of the waiters, in the train station and the bus stops, so that nothing gets lost, everything is returned to us, even the worst evil. It had not been a dream because otherwise I wouldn't have seen Godot placing the most gentle kiss in the forehead of the man that stole away from the night, in the embrace of the young men, clad with scarves and glasses in the hand and smiles at the height of the chin, as if living out of the scrapbook of an infamous painter rising to prominence on account of the shameless indiscretion of his work. The images moved not like shadows in a printed glass but more like ink dissolving unto water, running back and forth chasing the object of his most intimate yet untimely and unfulfilled affections, in between the cruelty of dancing and the silent imprecations of faces that bore price tags in lieu of a mouth that could for once devour an instant of love with the zeal of Cronos swallowing up his children, just like a lover, whose moment of justice is achieved when the whole world is consumed under the shortest glance into the fresh and naked skin of a neck or a wrist visible through the trenchcoat letting itself fall from the shoulders at the request of a turbulent hurricane rising from the belly up to the height of an eyelid being inspected carefully from across the table behind a pair of spectacles and a cup of coffee already cold. There was no disgrace in those perfect moments, there was no indiscretion, nothing to relieve or to release, then it could not have been a dream, because he was not entirely alone, in fact, he was not alone.

That the morning had been the dream and not the night is something that I could only accept over the course of the week following from that, and it was only then, that I told Godot my dream, before I jotted it down; he listened to me with paucity but hinted that he was being awaited elsewhere and couldn't spend the whole morning with me trying to separate the images of the night from the dream of the morning, trying to dissect through the exasperation and the glee; had I been a painter, I would have changed the music and the scenery, I wouldn't have cried then, I wouldn't have angered, I wouldn't have shamed. He pointed to me in his wisdom that my problem in separating the dream from the image, it was something that clearly had to do with the public; just like it was in the past when often I felt unable to write because of the cruel and scholarly inspecting eye of philosophers and readers, dead and alive, standing behind me in my desk, in the city of Jerusalem, hiding the trees at the church behind an ugly and humongous supermarket window, I felt often unable to write in the morning as well as in the night, because I felt observed, observed by other writers. Now the day had become a weak epiphany, a weak celebration of passion, as if the feeling of being observed by the lover in the most private and intimate moments of the day would save your soul from being debilitated, deranged and splattered on a glass for public view in a laboratory. The thought in itself was absurd but it was only the confirmatio of my obsession, the starvation from proper nourishment and the overflow of possible scenarions in which one craved to be seen by the other, and to no avail, perpetuating the uselessness of the day hours and the endless craving not for the other or his lips or his arms, the craving of being watched by him over and over, through the day, in the most immaculate and sinless perfection that no god in his right senses would have tolerated. One has to realize, that aestheticism nonwithstanding (and there's no aestheticism without cruelty being inflicted on oneself), no perfection can be loved by human heart, unless it's that of the tragic hero, as dead as he is unreachable, or instead, that of a pagan god alone. So unbefitting for people who grew up in Jerusalem, trained since childhood in the adoration of the most absolute, lonely and imperfect gods. The kind of gods that created the world on their own, at best an angel chattering here and there, how desperate and guilty is that!

But all in all, small talk or not, because of Jerusalem, I remembered the particulars of the dream, since it had taken place there in one morning of the summer, and I remembered I was weeping, but I can't recall why, perhaps during that part of the dream in which I broke in tears, I was still trapped in the frenzy of the night or counting the lights in the train trying to reverse all the hours, in a solemn attempt to deny everything, trying to run away from an evil seven-legged monster not without offering him my own leg to be chained in advance. There were precisely three people in the dream, three people that in themselves had been dreamt once, they had never been friends as much as they had traveled with me to places more dangerous than comfortable, where people had nothing to offer but the things that sheltered them from the perils of the world, such as laughter and a certain unsuitable sincerity of mind and I wonder why they would have liked to strand in Jerusalem that morning; perhaps to try and find with me again the grave of Else Lasker-Schueler that I sought after for six years and then at last got to know because of a postcard? I feel a bit sorry that there's nothing else about the dream that I can recall, maybe that was the whole point, that not even the present can be conquered so completely as if it were a prize delivered on account of glorious deeds, nothing ever remains, we're ought to respond even though we will be changed. Perhaps the only difference between the dream and the night, it is that the dream would be easier to achieve, and that the night, half-way distant, is already mixed with the blood.

Godot

To J.

I

Everything seems right in the world, if just for a moment, biffurcating into the night and yet it's still at the peak of the day hours, more like aurora. These seems to be time ahead to fulfill all the hours, almost as if there were no time at all, with the sole exception of the tiredness, hovering to heavily, like a wet feather over the palm of the hand; the same sense of admiration, yet so exasperated. The hours blend in, like transparent blocks. In spite of the eyelids, treacherous as always, underslept, the skin stares into the sun, for the first time in many a week, vehemently, wishing to be consumed, to be coveted, as if by a warm burning fog. The time also plays a role in the consumption, the waiting becomes so patient as if it were no waiting or procrastinating at all but merely another essential form of being, whilst at the same time, the pulsations of the hand, the desires of the ear, speak so differently, they've become completely consumed and consumated and burnt down, the freshness has been swallowed, in the course of the hours that did pass, even unto death, and death as such is impatient, being too tained by the still quiet, or rather the fear thereof.

II

The calm is nowhere near approaching, but the storm recedes back while water's still being washed, further and further away, like stains in the sand, stains of oil perhaps. The sight is magical, twisted, nothing is visible, everything is essential, the crucial colors are absent, undecipherable, starved from lust, the slowest fire and traces of Godot made with a flambeau in the cleanest snow; they melt more rapidly than they're visible, it would be perhaps timelier to shipwreck. !If only this death of suger would reveal itself sooner! I look at the whole world from outside, it appear much less chaotic and threatening than I had once felt, just two lines above, all I see is the table, without cloth but immaculate white, unblemished, only tarnished by the cubes of sugar, helplessly unused, and unorderly the sheets of paper, clean from blame, but not from sin, like the chest of a man in his bravest youth, invisible to the armpits, without this curious stench of parfum, forehead sweat and tar. The image is so entirely harmless, like a beggar or a lonely woman in the masterhand of Pisarro; they're held momentarily and into infinity and without telling their story, lest they ruin the indiscretion in the work of art, the very vows of sacrality in this rape, Dina and Daphne, disfigured, transmogrify into black rain.

III

The time vanished so swiftly, stole away from the knife, suddenly the suffocation stops at the height of the lips and protracts down to the smallest toe; how it's still sunny, yet sweetly melancholy and cloudy, that I don't know, it was like a vision.

On Writing

It is always the same shadow that from time to time hovers over me in circles and profusions, though I had forgotten about it for long, the inability remains fixed like a postcard, the sensuous desire to take hold of the present, in a way it could be said that the author, in particular the modern author, takes upon himself a role similar to that of the photographer, foremost the awareness that all the raw materials he's working with are nothing but dead. There's in this respect a certain wisdom in philosophy and in all articulate and normative forms of cultural criticism and it is if anything, the crystal clear knowledge that all knowledge of the present tense is immediately condemned to a framework of reference simultaneously (and at that absolutely) past and future, not one single scenario of history can be saved with only one hand, not even the Crucifixion itself.

That's the worse mistake in writing, the enamourement with things that are already dead, that are no longer in your possession and that are completely bereft of a willing ability to respond to the calls of literature, being this said, it's of course clear at this point that it's not possible to leave the claims of literature without becoming unpoetic, that is, the claim of literature, in particular solitude, the solitude not only in writing for silent and invisible witness but the loneliness of experience, the impossibility of real expression (otherwise one wouldn' t write) is precisely what constitutes the practice of literature; any breach to this unspoken agreement would mean immediately, leaving the realm of art altogether. You can't bring yourself to love and write about what's being loved as it goes through the process of turning a solid sentiment into a liquid feeling and then into mere unconscious steam reaching for the higher and higher depth that opens upwards and never recedes. The act of writing has to involve by the most sensical definition, a pure act of loss in concrete acts but with firm consciousness, otherwise the memory would play no role in the recreation of fiction.

Philosophy must be always present as it constitutes an inquiry into the thing that is being known, however art can never afford this cruel vice lest it incur in the mortal sin of forgetting its role within chains of meaning, literature can never be impatient, certainly not about itself, for it is risk about the world, its only form of reliance, and not certainty as such, otherwise there were indeed programatic assumptions about how literature is ought to be written. Impatience is a vile act for a writer because impatience in creation (unlike God and eternity) means only that you are waiting, and the waiting itself is a symptom of words, sounds and movements of the lips that have ultimately failed to deliver, thus, the waiting is an act of surrender and supplication before silence, there can be no literature in silence - there is no such a thing as an empty room, there is no such a thing as a room without sound (there's still the air), there's no such a thing as earthly space without color, without content and without matter. So correct had been Susan Sontag in saying that "I want to learn to be alone, to find it nourishing, and not just a mere wait". There's no literature while waiting (that's the domain of theology and philosophy), waiters' writing is not literature, it is just a remedy against madness.

Letter to Yussuf Prince of Thebes

Dearest Yussuf,

It's been such a long time since I wrote you last, at least what you can call a real letter, and not just broken pieces of information in an erratic fix of the pen and the hand. You're so often in my thoughts, in my conversations with people, in a way I would like to transmit to every person I meet in the world what you've meant for me, what it means for me in terms of art and philosophy to have met you, I would like to find words, but those words are still not invented, or if they exist, their meaning is so big that it wouldn't be appropriate to use them. Whenever something remarkable happens in my life, it is only to you that I can write, because these things that I'm telling, the story I'm telling, is something charged for me with a meaning very different than the meaning attached to ordinary objects, it's this predicament in which you're often left, when you're unable to leave completely the sphere of art, you become just too conscious of beauty, you're soaked in the essence of things, you can't avoid the horrible time pressing against your chest like a knife. It's this guilt, this endless guilt, about being alive, you wake up one morning, you're confused, you wish nothing but death, this wish as a sentiment is the only thing that can free you from the chains of ordinary life, this death wish, that is your token of loyalty with the present, with the brutal present, always presence, present.

The encounter with human beings is for people like us the highest expression of one's own power, this is where real talent for art and thought is best casted off into the world, encounters are the most important thing, also the most fragile and the most dangerous. I met Jonathan last week, after a week of long conversations over the internet about the most varied topics that extended well into the night, there was something so discreet and so honest about him, something that again I can't put into words, some melancholy abandonment that weighed heavily upon the sentences and the dots, there was this sentiment of sharing an absence of something that we both knew, perhaps it was an abscence of love, that slowly built up and conjured into a sense of possibility, this language so intense and so dense yet colloquial, there's no adequate terminology to describe that, it's something very similar to religion, I'm reminded of Margarete Susman and the little essays about Bloch and the buchlein "Vom Sinn der Liebe". Because of the horrible and tormented ways into which my life has unfolded for the last five years, I had forgotten that this language was still possible, the only referents I had for such possibilities were you, my only confident, and Veronica, my friend who committed suicide a week before my birthday in 2009, another artist, one of the few persons I know who lived her life so completely inside art, who never left aesthetics, you see, Veronica reminds me so much of you and me, in that our understanding of beauty comes from a very real experience in life that is not at all contemplative; our understanding of beauty and love has to do with a lack of something, with the fact that we've experienced so little beauty in the world, we remember it with just too much strength, we know very well the ideal position and perfection of beauty because we're so far removed from it in many ways, we're simple spectators.

Because I had renounced this idea to the realm of writing alone, I was so scared the day when I met him, because now I'm clearly assured that I don't cope with reality very well, even though I have to cope with such ugly faces of reality, dealing with money, family, the cold blood of academic people, being a gay man in the search of sex and pleasure, etc and I cope relatively well but when it has to do with my inner world of beauty and sentiments, the slightest breach in the plot, the simplest word, the most innocent behaviour, holds the power to hurt my feelings infinitely and throw me into the darkest abyss of melancholy and seamless pain. You know, people often say I'm a very brave person, but the truth is, I live in incredible fear, I go through life and the world frightened to death everyday, every moment, perhaps that's the price you have to pay for certain courage, to live in fear. I didn't know what would await me ahead, and I was so very scared, and then I arrived to the Italian cafe where we had agreed to meet, I waited in the outside being almost sure that for some reason he wouldn't show up, I've gone through this endless times, especially when I was younger, I remember all the time I spent waiting for many a gentleman, the time I spent dressing up and thinking everything out to the most intrincate detail, the combination of the color, the hair, the bag, the book I'd carry in my bag, how I'd sit, what I'd say, and then suddenly I spent beautiful hours alone, imagining that something tragic had happened, that for some reason they were just unable to come. He texted me and I found out he was already inside this beautiful place, he was warmer and more beautiful than I had thought, there was this beautiful smile, and everything was so casual, like a little chanson, I felt so happy that I was completely unable to swallow my food because I didn't want to miss one single second of the conversation, and as you know, conversation, that's my only real talent, my only natural talent, everything else is just a product of the melancholy caused by not being able to engage in conversations with people as much as I would like to, every philosophical hint, every work of art observed, every poem jotted down, it is only a failed attempt at a conversation, that's why it must be put to paper, in a way, it must be killed. I didn't want to miss one single detail because somewhere in my soul I felt this was about to end already, that it would be my lot and parcel in life to live out of some very brief moments, like a curse.

But yet the night was so different, it was like being with you, there were so many hours, so many beautiful hours, one more beautiful than the hour that just passed, and yet another hour more, more beautiful than the whole world, and then more hours, more beautiful than Paris, more beautiful than Jerusalem, more beautiful than anything you had ever seen, we sipped martinis like nectar from powerful elixirs made by gods in faraway Oriental kingdoms, walking down the street at night amidst the jolts of the traffic and the loud noises of people; I remember at some point he went to the bathroom and I was left there alone, staring across the table, to his half empty glass, to his jacket, and to the shadows around him and I thought for myself with a smile, this is the most beautiful hour that ever existed; of course there were other beautiful hours in the past, beautiful nights that also came with horrible mornings when the delusion had passed and nothing was left, but it is my belief that every moment of beauty you experience in the world changes you qualitatively, it changes not only the future but also how you look at the past from that moment onwards, the details are not important, but there's an essential change in you. I thought, this is my glory and my victory, this is my conquista of the world, this is a moment like when I threw your party in Jerusalem, the moment in which I'm king and lord of the whole world, everything that is of importance is happening there in that moment. But the night still kept going, until the very end, there was nothing sexual about it, but there were lots of lips and hands, kisses in the forehead, the long embraces, things that look like love, the dancing, the jokes, the drinks, the soft touches, the irony, it is like being with somebody you've known for your whole life, the melancholy in common but also the sense of life, the risk, the madness, the vertigo, the fall... All together.

For other people, and perhaps also for him, it's just a night out, a night of drinks, a good "date", but for me it was like the confirmation of everything I've been and done, the aesthetic moment of life par excellence, the moment when Godot arrives, the real Godot, arriving unannounced. I really didn't want the night to end, I wanted that night to go on forever... When it ended, even though it had been so perfect and beautiful, I went home and cried the whole night, listening to Edith Piaf and wondering when will I have again a night like that, when will I conquer the world again only for myself? When will I look at the eyes of glory? You can't imagine my sadness after this carnival of emotions, it was not only the cafe but the party after that and the dancing, the lips, the hands, the embraces, the little fights, the tears, the strong emotions, very strong emotions from both actors, if it had been not something real but a theater play, you'd think it's Waiting for Godot, they're both waiting, so tired from life yet still so young, so full of life and love, so full of hope, the darkness of the night becomes confused with the shiniest morning you ever saw, like the summer in the beach of Tel Aviv, like Katherina and Ari at the Scottish bar sipping martinis by the bar, yet all surrounded by so much sadness and decadence, the endless drinking, the smiles confused with the pain from inside, the desire to be free and to be loved. It was so beautiful Katherina that I only remember small details, I don't even quite remember what he looks like and why I found him so beautiful but what's impressed a watermark in me is how I felt, how my eyes saw the world during those eternal hours that compress all of human history. It's been so many years since I felt anything like that, and he, well, it's a sad story, you know, he lives in Germany and is here only for a few weeks, and speaking of failed love, he had a relationship of five years with a Frenchman who just dumped him without any explanation, so clearly he's love handicapped and I think you and me know very well how much one suffers from unlove. So he definitely can't be mine, not geographically and not mentally, it's just a connection through the soul, very fragile but yet strong as diamonds... At the same time he pours his kindness to me in such a beautiful way, the letters and the calls, the conversations on how alive he feels around me, how contented, the plans for the future, what we would do if we'd go to London, or to Berlin, or which parties we would attend in Barcelona and in Tel Aviv, the meeting with my friend Katherina, the paintings she would make for him, the long nights of martinis or porto or whiskey with vermouth. And the kinder he is, the more I hurt, because I so much don't want to lose him, but even if so, what he doesn't know is that after that night, I'll never lose him, he's already in my skin. Everyday I'm more and more scared, scared from life, but if anything, if all this suffering, all these horrible days in Colombia, all the cocaine and all the pain and the silence and the loneliness, if all of it was the price I had to pay for that night, it was completely worth it and I'm willing to pay twice that price. It's all a fantasy, but yet how beautiful it is when you learn to dream again, something inside you is changed, love always makes you beautiful and good.

Time is a monster my dear, a horrible seven-legged monster, because yes, it's been so long since I last saw you, I don't even remember you physically so well, but I do remember my feelings for you, the uniqueness of this friendship that should last for a hundred years more and after that too, you know that you're so important for me, you're present in everything I do, even when I do nothing, or when I do evil things that hurt me. I definitely think we've grown into different persons but yet my dear, our friendship is the same, it's always going to be, because its roots are so strong, not like futile street talk, it's so completely rooted in beauty. We're different people indeed, I see it in my face, in my hands, in my philosophical style even, less radical than it used to be but as you can tell, more sophisticated, less German and less Jewish, more open to the world and to the rawest experience than to philosophical categories and boxes, closer to Andy Warhol than to Hegel. But this is a process, and we're going through it, trying to not miss one single day in it. You see, I saw myself as a philosopher back then in Jerusalem and not anymore, if anything, today I can tell you the only thing that interests me is conversations, everything else, the works of art (and not philosophical treatises) are simply witnesses to the failure in conversating with the world. It's always a matter of money because well it's not only that we're poor but we don't know how to live, we want to live so much and too much, everything at once and in one day, we never learn the lessons, that's why we can never save. But be assured that we'll meet again, I promised you I'd come back to Europe and I will, that day is everyday closer now, but I won't tell you much about it, just one day I'll be at your door with a bottle of something and everything will be like it always was.

I have to work a lot at the moment with some English classes, I'm so unfit for work and life, I hate every moment of it, but I need money to spend expensive nights out with Jonathan, therefore I have to do it, but not for long. My intellectual development is now very slow but steady, I read novels, very modern novels, learning about how people think life today, I read a lot about modern art, about commercial art, each day I feel I'm getting somewhere, but I find it very hard to write, except when I write him, you know me, I can only write from a real source of life, I don't understand abstract writing, that's just so stupid. You're right, remember Virginia Woolf saying "you can never have peace in life by avoiding life... you have to look at life in the face, always in the face" and I think this is exactly what Jetztzeit means after all. Men also like me a lot at the moment, maybe it's only because they detect that I can't like anyone back right now, my mind is in the search for something too big, not too big a love because that can kill, but too big a person to love a little, you know, there's this song that says... "the world is not enough, but it is such a perfect place to start", this is what happens to us, we demand from life more than what it can give and thus we suffer, but we must do it, there's no other way, there must be a radical instinct to life, otherwise it's just empty time. I loved so much the beatiful things you said about me and my gift for conversation, perhaps the most beautiful things ever said to me. About Coco Chanel, maybe another day I'll write you more, but you MUST read her biography, she reminds me of you so much, such a talented and strong lonely woman, so powerful and brilliant yet so weak and nervous and lonely, so hurt from love, full of life for parties and nights, so full of glamour, and one thing I understood: to be glamorous you need to be a lonely individual, there's no other way to stand out from the crowds, glamour is the most extreme form of sadness, always remember that. That's why Hollywood can never be glamorous, they're only rich.

Out of Time

To K., M. and J.

It is only when we let go of ourselves, when the space occupied by our bodies doesn't suffice, it is only then that we become aware of the cruel nature of time, it presses against our chest like a knife, like a vest of the ungodly and the invisible, protecting from loss and oblivion everything essential, everything that cannot be remembered. Every moment of the hour signifies the madness, one feels like he wants to cut the flesh, to bruise it, to destroy the body, in order to let everything trapped within run free of its own accord, to reach for the essential in the shoulders and the arms and the hands and the lips of dew, to escape from the suffocating constrictions of the jackets but also of the houses, the coffee tables and the telephones, the will to surrender falls from the eye of the observer just like a waterfall trying to encounter along its passing, a gulf to embrace, the little caress of the rocks and the crystal finger tips of the algae and the sweetness of the night soaking the ice so completely so that it melts into the limb of a hill, coming closer to the water in a failed suicidal attempt, throwing itself overhead, dancing without feet and with one only melody - the absence.

It is only in this loss that we let go of the watches on the wrists and on the walls, the watches of the eyes and the palm of the hand, everything is so absolutely present, this presence so swiftly vanishing, dissolving unto itself, occupying all the space available in the universe until it can no longer be seen, it has swallowed the stars and the planets but also the pulsations of the stomach and the movements of the hand; that's how it must have felt during the Creation, free of sin and free of guilt, without anxiety, without the absence, without absconding or retreating, so completely free. Only in the most cruel moments of impatience, we're reminded in deliberate conspicuousness, of the gifts of Paradise, but without the innocence, we've been given our passions instead; we carry them through, offer them to our fellowmen are a gift, there's no visible world without them, there's no reason to despair, in the wait, that's where time is... Impatience is sinful, it's a dried up well, every moment of it, fixes anew the course of the waters, it's a bleeding tree of life. You begin wondering, you wouldn't know where to go afterwards, cling onto the idea that there's a home, in arm, or in a shoulder, but you're still looking for the keys even though the doors are slammed open before you, while the portico was set on fire, you wouldn't know where to run, but you're already inside, that's why it burns so badly in the eye, it's too late, you're already running out of time, it presses against your chest with the bad aftertaste of loss, but the essential, like the waters, will always flow in you, even when you change into an older skin or possess another well.

"Morning Passages"

To J.

"Mephiboshet"

Your flickering eyes

Small birds suckling the nectars.

When you wept

The king hearkened not.

When you fell

The world did not return

To void-and-chaos.

Mephiboshet, you dreamt

Of a more innocent friendship.

You sickened at the wisdom

Of the ancient serpent,

O Son of Jonathan!

(Zelda Mikhovsky-Schneerson, translation is mine)

"I want to learn to be alone, to find it nourishing and not just a mere wait"

-Susan Sontag

The scenery seemed to have changed abruptly at the realization that there is no such a thing as an empty room, he conjured up images of Abyssinia, everything disappeared under the spell of unlikely sights. He sat across the blank page in the attempt to write something for himself that would not grow into a will of consolation, counting the hours on and on, imagining that that night would never end and that it would be possible to take posession of it well into the next morning, and the morning after and yet another morning after that. He could remember every detail, every practical detail, the journey from home all the way to the wooden panels that furnished the walls and the well-known inability to swallow the freshly baked goods so that he would not miss one single second of the conversation. Then strolling around the city jolts, the pleasure he could often take in the noise and the evening traffic as a mere spectator in the tireless search for a moment of beauty with himself; the fearless panic that devoured courageously the tips of the fingers and bruised the skin from beneath the fibers of tweed and wool, the unwillingness to let go of the scarf and other pieces of clothing; it was almost a matter of shame, this almost sensuous desire to want not to be seen in any way, hiding from the viewer across the table, the fibrilous pulsations of the blood running through the neck back and forth in between brain and heart, the delicate wrists that could have been made out of fresh bread and not of old flesh, even the eyes too eager to look always elsewhere, a rather frantic desire at mere contemplation, and that total avoidance of oneself.

Yet all of the essential details were elusive through and through, they seemed to form knots at the height of the throat, that were pulled back from displaying, by a forceful and naive serenity that rested around the belly but were never to be seen. The greatest gift that one receives from a stranger is always that warm sensation that there's no destination in plain sight, that the person, in spite of his covetousness, is not willing to let himself be seen at all, that absolute solitude is the greatest evening companion when it's shared with somebody else, that every fabric of the conversation is yet another desperate attempt to cling forcefully to one's solitude. This is how we set ourselves to spy on our fellow human beings in the companion of yet another veteran soldier, to realize that we have somewhat aged, and that it is a good thing because one of the most merciless demands of beauty is that it be contemplated with glee and love only after the moment when it's no longer in your posession, when it's no longer a presence, when its symbols become undechiperable to the hand that drew them and carelessly casted them into the world. This type of beauty has manifold shapes but in common between them all, it is only the fact that they deliberately avoid perfection and completion; the simplicity of the interminability resides precisely in that this beauty cannot be wholly grasped when observed from the outside, lest it become a corpse, a corpulent structure of dead matter that can no longer be touched or felt by the bare hand of the passer-by.

What a great melancholy there is, I thought for myself, in that kind of beauty in which you're allowed to participate but yet cannot keep even the simplest bread crumb, used-up napkin or vanishing cube of ice for yourself, "It seems that he was permitted to find the Archimedean point only under condition that he would use it against himself". Every form of modern art in the world is aimlessly attempting to do just that, to cling onto the rawest materials of our own consumption in order to create a memory that just like in classical art, could last forever, yet the enterprise is so completely futile because those are memories that we no longer want to keep; in the moment they are turned into memories they should be washed off from the basin at the top of the repository of things we find beautiful and not. There are elixirs too, easily available, sometimes in the shape of a glass but often times also in the shapes of faces and hands and strokes of the hair, elixirs that make ugliness disappear and turn every single second of the day into that kind of beauty we would like to participate in, joining this party of the dead, shortlisting the information and selecting what we find most nourishing. It is like the metaphor of loving someone at the airport, through the window panes that separate the different waiting rooms; imagining scenes of suffering from one to the next station of the Cross, out of the simplest glass of whiskey held by the hand, out of the watch missing from the wrist or the ring from the finger, thinking that maybe it was stolen by a lover or asked to be turned in after a sentimental disaster. This is a rather voyeuristic price to pay, that of the artist and the writer, the infinitely aesthetic pleasure of experiencing love and desire from the vantage point of the most absolute and impossible distance, there's no pity and no mercy in this loving observation, it's riddled by the most objective form of cruelty. The unwillingness to interfere in the slow lane of biological processes, avoiding the nearness of the lips with the only intention to avoid not a bad aftertaste but with the firm resolution to supress and surpass all guilt. Guilt must be supressed insofar as it is rememberable.

This could happen to anyone and anywhere, the geography is irrelevant when it comes to anatomy, this is no common sense like the astronomy of the planets, but not altogether irrational; the present is entirely dead just one minute thereafter, how can five years be rendered irrelevant by one single moment? It's easier to cancel out five years than one single moment, because the nature of time itself makes the momentarily far more fixed in our minds in the sense that attempts to understand what is just happening and suddenly has passed, are to no avail. If I had any talents with painting, the landscape of that very night, it would be more like a double-faced muse bleeding to death with a glass and a smitten smile in between her finger tips. To write even, it is like a little death, it would steal away everything that is essential to tell about a story and that's when a teller knows that he's ought to stop at the expense of making up a fairy tale that could be far more convincing that a list of deeds in the Stations of the Cross, for there's nothing more brutal and unlawful than stealing from oneself, from one's own pleasure, from one's own righteous sense of enjoyment and imperfect beauty, it's tantamount to observing one's own death. The next morning thus, was not different than it should have been, it wasn't entirely free of guilt or consumption, one day less of sun for you and one more for the world, the continuity had been broken like in every other possible art work, life hadn't changed and that's where the cruelty of making works of art out of such raw material resides, for the creator - it's God's own loneliness after the wrongdoings of the creation - life is not bereft of its own autonomous powers. Philosophers of history would however point a finger to the fallacy: Everything in the world is qualitatively changed, everyday, by every person, by every casual encounter, even in spite of the domineering fear, the fear of the stranger for each and every one of his own kind. The next morning was fresh like the beginning of the tides in summertime, it felt opulent, scandalously privileged, full of frenzy and bright as lust. That's why the story of a night not always needs to be told as such, this is the privilege of those who seek no consolation from life, and whose guiding principle is more risk than patience.

"If someone comes and declares "This will be the historical redeemer of mankind, I know its name" - then we might easily identify him as the prophet of the false Messiah. The prophet of the true Messiah remains silent. He does not know. But he knows one thing - that one should not say that the Messiah will never come. One should never let the empty chair be occupied by a pretender (and every occupant is a pretender), but it is better if one does not remove the empty chair. My conviction, or rather, my feeling, suggests that I leave the chair there, in the middle of the room at the head of the table, where it remains all the time exposed in its emptiness. The chair speaks to the denizens of the absolute present honestly only in its emptiness. My intuition suggests that only emptiness is fullness for the moderns, that there's no other kind of hope beyond hope, at least not for those who assume the position of reflected postmodernity".

-Agnes Heller

The Discovery of Heaven

To Harry Mulisch

Now that you're far, from the questions asked by man, I cannot help but wondering what that heaven looks like, whether there are similarities at all between the rows of houses and the canals underneath, whether you can hear the waters all the while wars take place elsewhere. I wonder if the land was finally born in you, if there's any lands! If I could wish for something today, is for you to tell me that heaven looks exactly like the earth, that there's no other life, that the bricks smell the same when they're punctured by the bayonets. Are you still writing? Is it allowed to write? Sometimes it seems to me as if the earth is a heaven turned upside down, we are hanging from above glued to a crutch looking out into the vastness of the universe, as if the earth is that void that we see down below when we reach for the Wadden sea and imagine that that's where the world ends. I wonder if heaven has names, if heaven has hatred, because otherwise, what would be then of the language of love? I wonder what they think of the churches, what they think of the dead, that are buried somewhere, like Our Lord, that could never rise to heaven, because there's just too much soil sheltering them from this absurd vertiginous freedom, too much water dividing the places and the faces. My gut feeling says that heaven is very different, and that I wish not to go, that there're no super powers, that there're no higher truths, that you're just waiting for us there, to tell us to come back, to ride on the next bus, to land on the Zuiderduintjes, to go fishing for a while, to end at the same place where blue and white become one. That is why you painted it like this, like an afternoon, somewhere, in an apartment block, in those ugly streets of Rotterdam.

Neverland

I wished not go

Into the foreign land

I knew not

Where to find

The gardens

In its womb

Should I not

Remember

Could I but wish

What it looked like

In that point of the summer

Jotted with a brush

Patting fields of flowers

Distant from the houses

The dreams

That I harbored

Since that childhood day

When I saw the land

Friesland

When I felt the skin

Of the bruised earth

Growing under my feet

Timelessly

Regaling me

With showers of weak light

When will I see the land?

Will I be able to take pleasure in you?

Answer my call!

The land never forsaken

All at my bequest

One whole country for a child

When will I see you again?

When, Netherland?

November

Literature that is no longer readable

At the expectation

Of faintest love

The desperate agreement

With the laws of the world

Empty the sketchbooks

Ransacked by words of the hand

By movements of the fingertips

A vast field of greenery and flies

Telegrams, without address

Without recipient

By an unknown sender

Too much loyalty

In impossible faces of men

Too much serendipity

To sell for friendship

To expect reward

A silence more forceful

That rustling jolts

All the more forgetful

Swallowed by rivers

Watching over the planes

From the bottom of the waters

The legs bruised not by rocks

But by the soft touch of the fish

The algae

The softest pasture

Fallen into disgrace

In a winter morning

Next to a violin

In the abandonment

Of beauty

A lonely mirror

Trying to catch a glimpse of the woman

In another room of the palace

Imagining the vanity

Of aging gracefully

Brushing the hair

With linens of gold

Praying for innocence

While devouring the flesh

Of a sinful soldier

Or another murderer

Sarajevo

A sailor in the mud

Taking shelter from the truth

With yet another bullet

The little men

Made out of paper notes

Beheaded by the child

Unable to understand

The language

Of the poem jotted down

By an English woman

During a farewell afternoon

By the banks of the river

No longer watery of frost

Laden with a corpse

Followed by another

In unison

A new song

Not for anyone dead

But for the mightiest deed

Of our son of man

Of our bullets

Our children

Of bayonets

Prague

I am unable to dance to the tune

That smells beneath the earth

That hampers one from death

It is a long deterred muse

The landscape most unlikely

A fear of yet another shipwreck

Sounding aloof but verily

The lighthouse, the rows, the deck

Europe after the Rain...

So far it's been

From within a cave

Crafted with slow deeps

Underneath a stair

During my sleep

I endure visions

Of the mightiest port

The kinder skin of grass

And flowers in the fall

In my dream

The stench of the smoke

Pouring out of the skin

Into the cells of cement

Is transformed into waters

That navigate through the nails

Shun off the call of one's death

I see snails and rows of houses

But I hear only waters

They suffocate in the small islands

Twisted from their own thirst

To love the meadows of sand

The crave for piles of hay

Burning in spectacular yellows

Every scrap of paper, a riviera

Keeping the secrets

Of journeys yet undone

Everything vanishes into plaster

Into the smells of unwashed cloth

Into the distance

Kneeling down before the dreams

Begging for another minute

Of delusion

Of a better world

Or a real port

Where the cave

Is transformed into the light

Where the silence

Becomes louder than the tide

The elbows of the poet

Are visible at dusk

The young flesh bruised by the hours

Of the pen

Wearing the thinness of the lotus

Reaching out

Without dying

And also without falling

For kinder words

For another world

Response to Raphaël

"I want an absolute transformation, however minute, that the encounter with a person of a work of art will change everything" -Susan Sontag

The discovery of a new work of art, the musical piece or the painting, has the primordial quality of throwing us back into a simultaneity of times, usually the return to one's own origin that serves as well the purpose of advancing the nearness, however figurative, of one's own death. In spite of its greatest theoretical ambitions, philosophy has always lagged behind in the much sought-after purity of this experience, insofar as this discipline, as a science, has no immediate access to the eyes and the eyes of the world, death as the ultimate aesthetic experience is vetoed for the philosopher - The Absolute, insofar as it doesn't concern the individual parts, is unable to turn a glimpse on itself, lest it happens all too late and therefore, the philosopher knows no lifetime, in the nauseating madness, by-product of absolute vertigo, the philosopher, even if he has lived a very long life and has a fair amount of memories to recount, realizes that he has no past, as long as he's been a philosopher through the whole of his life. This has plagued not only Gilson, but everyone from Plato to Spinoza to Hegel. For the philosopher, the testimony of art, its quality as an artifact of the world, is preposterously ephemeral and the choices left as few, because in this "stans aeternitatis", the time of the creation of the world and withal, the urgency inherent to life, are as alien to the philosopher as silent the breathe of an evil spell. There's no progress in philosophy, no history of philosophy, no philosophical history or historical philosophy, as long as one hasn't surrendered to the faith that the world is being looked at from the quintessentially future perspective of a day after the advent of catastrophe; when the world as we know, has been helplessly destroyed, its morphology altered and the shape of its permanence, has ultimately passed. Philosophy is a science of death, and this had been apparently very clear to Plato himself who held philosophy happily liable to the charges of being the science of "how to die". In this sense the enmity between philosophy and politics and life, is less than a casual accident, it constitutes the most radical form of homelessness, or in the words of a medieval emperor, "That be world be destroyed, but truth shall prevail". There comes inevitably the Christian question over the use of the world, in this valley of tears, the desert of Egypt through which the People of Israel are ought to cross through the madness of Reed Sea; wouldn't it be better to be at home in the world and yet dispossessed of all possible truth? This curiosity over the world plagued even the pious and sterile Lessing who wrote once, "If God would hold all the truth of the world in one hand and in the other the interminable doubt and thirst over truth and would ask, Lessing, choose one of the two! Truth belongs to thee alone my Lord". Wouldn't it be better to reject truth for the sake of an abode in the world? It's not the eternal truth, it's certainly no truth, but why should we abandon the pleasures of the world for the sake of truth alone?

We're confronted then with broken mirrors everywhere, every work of art manifests itself in the world in a two-fold manner: It constitutes the world-building activity par excellence while at the same time its permanence, the fact that just like the world, it was there before us, it will be there after we part, this fact alone destroys the unity of life, destroys the biological continuity of life, it points toward a sense of transcendence that can no longer be reached, it's perpetually melancholic, an image stolen from consciousness and yet unavailable within the repository of passing worldly artifacts and produce of human labor - necessary for survival of the species, otherwise it couldn't quality for a place of honor among the works of art. Historically, philosophy has demonstrated a certain aversion to consider the works of art, the temporary quality of artistic production was incompatible with metaphysics in the medieval period and in the modern period, unbearable for the utilitarian equation between means and results that has defined philosophy through the whole of the modern period since it is the artist alone the free man, the only individual in the hierarchy of society whose production is not necessary for functional survival and whose life does not depend on production alone. But the fascination about works of art has been as perennial as the enterprise of metaphysics itself, there has been no other source of philosophical imagination that the commentary on the extant works of art from different periods. Fascination and imagination however are not coeval with truthfulness and pleasure as such, as much as deceive, has never been a category of systematic thought unless we are taking for thought the abstract notions of pleasure derived Kant's Critique of synthetic judgments a priori rather than the unmediated and raw experience of art as it was bequeathed to us by the trembling and fear of the learned men of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The human eye of these men of science and virtue and their discovery of different worlds, inside and outside the earth, was radically affected by the infinite diminishing in the stature of Western man; they were only able to pull a survivor's trick - they laughed hysterically, but beneath this laughter hid their infinite tremor, their infinite vertigo as they stood in front of the abyss - "Oh the time is out of joint! Cursed spite, that thou wert borne to set it aright" (Hamlet). If such were in fact the dimensions of the universe, there could be no possible way to find out who we are or what the meaning of life is, for as long as we're alive and of this infinitesimally small world. It might be that this was the transitional period of art between forms and expressions, but yet the fact remained unchanged even at the times of WWII when Romain Rolland wrote in a letter to Stefan Zweig that art brings us consolation as individuals but it is powerless before reality. Nietzsche knew this well as his death loomed close and he only found consolation from his great physical pain as his sister played the piano.

Sweelinck was one of these men, for whom music was not only aesthetic pleasure but the impossible realization that there were no longer safeties in the world, the heraldic awareness that the choice between God and hell was not as paradoxical as we might have thought: It could have been a simple choice between leaving the world as we know it to be lifted up by the arm of the Holiest, or to stay in the world and reject paradise, to stay in the world and as in Kleist, deny the possibility of innocence once we can no longer choose ourselves for the god or the stone, we are barely witnesses. Christian art as such is in principle a little bit unchristian as all art is insofar as the representability of anything, is an immediate call to its ultimate mortality, the suffering of the Cross, the greatest burden ever borne by man was turned into an object of contemplation, into an object of beauty and as such into an object of death if one insists in remaining a Christian. The wolf is at the door, the close of times always at hand, and the struggle with the demon always in the greener grass: The violent force of Sweelinck lies on his similarity with Goethe, in the fact that he always stood at the gates, he looked at the abyss into the eye in a clear morning of the summer when the beauty of its shine was visible at peak of twilight, he saw the fires of hell consuming his soul; yet unlike Goethe he saw the danger, he saw Kleist and Hoelderlin and Nietzsche falling into the abyss, he wiped the sweat from their forehead, tended to their wounds, quenched their thirst with fresher waters, but he did not jump. This is the greatness and the burden of his realization. Unlike the four Protestant agitators that surrender to the endless reciting of a "Deus excelsis gloria", Sweelinck could not kneel down, he was the miracle and the wine but not the saint. His greatest sin: The silence before the Kingdom of Heaven. It was perhaps someone like Sweelinck behind the miracle of the Holy Cecile, the maker of this great impasse, it is the evil spell that he himself did not fall prey to. The great sin of the listener is that the more he listens to the magic, the more he is surrendered to this world with its ugly and endless pathways of graves extending along the grass that grows with the violence of life and wraps everything into a symphony of oblivion, this is perhaps what eternity is, the fact that we can't survive the hour of freedom even by one single hour. The listened kneels down but what comes closer is his death, and not the gates of heaven that are open only to those innocent, only to puppets and to gods. The sublime object is always an unchangeable artifact, that's the secret of its cruelty, that the sublime cannot be sublimated, not even by silence. Those who search for God in Sweelinck, just like in the Christian piety of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, are entirely doomed, because the anxiety is the symptom of traveling toward an impossible destination; Kierkegaard was clear about that: the Christian does not exist YET. The suffocating and toxic air derives not from its eternal rising into the clarity of the skies above, but from the fact that "the Church, that community of God in the future, eternally dissatisfied with the present" (Bloch) is still a descent, the place hasn't changed and if it would, we wouldn't know, because every self-proclaimed Messiah is a false of Messiah - even if the Messiah is a piece of music alone. The miracle is not so much the conversion of the water into wine but as in Rilke the maddening fact that the water is still water and the wine is still wine. The channels of friendship ought to remain open, they assure us to the practice of reality and ultimately define that we are not alone with God in the universe, if the ascent would be immediate, we would no longer need each other, but as the abyss deepens and tightens at the level of the neck to the point of strangling, the other, that is, the friend, is the insurance that there's no insurance for truth as long we we remain committed to the life of this world. There's then a way to circumvent the valley of tears and to be at home: To kneel down with the security that we shall not rise, but that, in order to be accomplished, it needs at least two.

The danger is not to fall, that would be too easy, the danger is to remain at the threshold, looking down, that's in fact, the greatest sin, that's why the aspiration to transformation is the only commodity that can save us not, only the fallen can be saved, the puppets and the gods.