It is possible to overdose on sanity.

i have been hurled out of the darkness, spinning dizzy
not the hazy delights of dreaming, but fiery warmth of real light
i know i am merely a passerby who still tastes of dawn

Merry Christmas!

[Book.]

(I know the madness will never leave me, not completely. The memory of snakes is ingrained, in my genes, deeper. Darkness seems to carry itself in my mind, as if — if it were to dissipate, then none of me would be left, as if I were a shadow that had no real component to stretch from. So many times I have imagined that I am a doomed man, a damned man, a forsaken man, a guilty man, a lost man. I may never know what the truth of any of it is, and such is the way of the world. I have accustomed myself to the fierce uncertainty of it all. But there are these side moments, always coming and going like a sparrow were a moment, here and gone: a small, blue hope out the corner of my eye. Just enough to tell me that there is love in the world. Small vials of minding water in a desert of mindlessness.)

Am I still standing here?

[This is the end of Chapter 1, the whole of which you can see here.]

Running all my life
Running all my day
Running through the night
Seems like forever
Take me now
I’m so tired
Take me now
This time, forever

– The Alarm

Joan Miró: Still Life with Old Shoe

Click on the pic for a larger version.

we forget, scars remember themselves
i learn how to work in the dark, i remember
a calm: all pain is illusion, without center
(dreams emerge through us as things)
i hold as still as darkness, and i listen
the gnarls on the trees murmur deeply
i fathom the secret lives, sifting, lingering

True and genuine worship is when man, through his spirit attains to friendship and intimacy with God. True and genuine worship is not to come to a certain place; it is not to go through a certain ritual or liturgy; it is not even to bring certain gifts. True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible.

In the dreaming, I met the man I could have been, and let him go.

In the dreaming, my worst fear came true, and all I could do was go on.

In the dreaming, I have flown and jumped into the sky, and believed.

In the dreaming, I have shaped worlds to come, however arbitrary.

In the dreaming, doom has visited me, left me tangled in despair.

In the dreaming, hope never died, however small the candle’s light.

In the dreaming, death had no power over me, for I belong elsewhere.

I am not death, I am not the eater of worlds. I am not time, I do not ineffably wear away the stone. I am far less diligent than the seconds that pass, and one day nothing will remain of me but dust, easily scattered. This is what it means to be mortal: that the earth breathes in, and collects you as the dawn begins, to exhale the remains of the day where you have left a smudge upon the sunset. If one is lucky, someone of the next breathing will point at it and say, “How curious,” and go on with the comings and goings of the passing hour. This is what it means to be mortal: in this one day we have, how spectacular is the light, that many will miss that they hide away from the dangerous breathing: never to come again, however much it is taken for granted, this inexorable passing of the world.

How can you wish all the wrongs done you to be redressed, while all the wrongs you do to be overlooked?

there has been much dreaming i have forgotten, faded light
there is no beginning to go back to; it has moved on as well
no choice but to go forward in time, hope against the darkness

Love, reign o’er me

– The Who

Max Ernst: Configuration

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The principle of sacrifice is that we choose to do or to suffer what apart from our love we should not choose to do or to suffer.

[Book, if you remember that.]

How did I get here? A small, immovable question. Like all transcendent things, I can look at every piece of the puzzle and the way they all fit together, and it will still be a mystery. Or is it merely that it is as a part of Alice in Wonderland, a story cleverly turned inside out, and now it is of the weird? (I pretend to use the archaic meaning, touched with the modern interpretation: the weird was once one’s fate.) I have been nowhere, it would seem, between a before and a now. So what exactly does one do when he imagines that he has been to the platonic Land of Pure Forms? After all, the zone of zero is the only ideal that has any reality we can measure. (That, in itself, being only as useful as knowing that it must be raining somewhere: true, but a kind of rubber that never hits the road, like an eraser that’s more valuable than anything it might erase.) And I suppose I have been “here”, too, more than once — the only place I have never visited is that mythic place of “there”. Next door to cloud nine.