Who cares? (This is not a rhetorical question.)

I have become a dream undreamt, a heart that never loved. My lamentation is not so tragic, it is all the more sadder how mundane it truly is. Who will cry for me, if I cannot even cry myself for myself? I wish perhaps some great suffering, if only to know that it be finite, and at the end to know that these “dues” everyone harps on have been paid in full; I have no hope for great joys. Or perhaps all of this is a passing fancy, and I am in truth happier than I let me in on — mayhap I am ready to spring some sort of surprise on myself? Truly, I am of two minds, half great, half pathetic, which blur together in some sort of muddled stew of consideration. So full of sound and fury? Signifying? No, let it not be so: let me raise a glass to ever glass that could not be raised, for the arm to cheer subsided into that good night. I have breath in me still: I can still dream that dream, my heart can love in some hopeless cause. Time has not done me in, quite yet.

I am invisible, at times, a shadow of what I could be. I move and you will not see me, a blurry face that makes no impression, a figure that could be anyone’s. I am less than everyman, for he has a voice, somewhere: I am that anonymous one who never had any quotes attributed to him, the masses distilled into one form, which is mindlessly cheering at some mass-produced event somewhere. And yet, there was always hope in me. That I could make of nothing something — not that I started with so little, but that I had made of it such waste, the potential squandered in a puddle of nebulous philosophies. One day, you may see me, when I have overcome myself, when I regain what I had before the innocence was lost, and shine like the child of God that I was meant to be. But whatever may be, let it never be said that I let it all run its course without that I tried. That I went without deciding to chart into the waters of a dream. Life seems to run out before one has finished tasting: thus any taste, let me savor.

Is it unfair to suggest that, in some of us at least, [Christianity] hasn’t fully worked so far simply because, at the pinch, at the decisive moment, we don’t want it to work or ourselves to be lifted up above the failings and disloyalties we find so alluring, but rather to be enabled to continue them without the ugly consequences of so doing, to have the inexorable laws of life bent aside in our favor, so that we can squeeze through and escape, without reaping what we have sown; because, as we misunderstand it, the whole point of the good news our Lord brings is the (to us) gladsome announcement that God is happily much more morally indifferent than our consciences had thought, and is not going to make a fuss about our sins and such-like trivial peccadilloes, but will surely let us off — because, in fact, we have not grasped that the core and essence of the Gospel… is its tremendous and glorious revelation of how deadly is God’s hatred of sin, so that He cannot stand having it in the same universe as Himself, and will go any length, and will pay any price, and will make any sacrifice, to master and abolish it, is set upon so doing in our hearts, thank God, as elsewhere.

what do i know of fire that never dies, of forever?
my passion fills a thimble in its much gathered totality
these instantaneous things i feel cast no shadow

Night falls, a raven wing over the face of the whole sky.

Night falls, coolness that permeates the thickness of the air.

Night falls, and dreams await in the place of all wondering.

Night falls, and really, all it is is a shadow, a negative thing.

Night falls, the wolf in the distance howling at his hunt.

Night falls, and the rain washes away all my memories.

Night falls, nowhere am I to be found in the darkness.

Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy.
There’s nothing you can make that can’t be made.
No one you can save that can’t be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be in time
It’s easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

– The Beatles

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes: The Poor Fisherman

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Look, up in the sky.

We are made of the void, you and I, a conceit of physics, where from nothing all things are conceived. Movements of space-time, we are all of us merely ripples in the ether, which is itself only a concept. Many of us believe that we can never know the true particulars of all our particles; there are some, though, who just think we have not dug deep enough; myself, I will always believe that we hang upon uncertainty always, and the absolute ground of all things is not for man to comprehend. All our networks of knowing start at the middle and extend upward and downward in structure arbitrarily far, but anything like ultimate meaning is meant, I think, only for the infinite to grasp. We do remarkably well for living with such unknowns like we do; we take what we can get and make of the things around us that which will yield shape. We are the means by which the universe perceives itself, and perhaps we are not nothing, after all. True, we are not the I AM that needs not any other reason, but made in the image of such light, we ourselves can say to the darkness that let there be light be so, however feeble our light to be, and to see it comes that there was light, after all.

in a soft voice, we speak aloud what we believe
we think no one hears us, and we speak as though to a friend
the world passes by like nothing happened
the day goes to sleep and night stares at us blankly
there are no secrets if no one will care
mirrors have no memory of what we wanted to be
we ourselves forget that we had such words, that needed to be said
words that in our saying, proved that we existed
now, that time has moved us on to other places
we remember some things, and no one is the wiser
we know some things no one possibly would understand
we spoke of what it means to be alive

if the forgetting remembered, the reasons would be plain
how we understood so much, and did so little
because this is just a dream, and we never did say those things
and the world passes by like nothing happened
because for all this dreaming, nothing did

We must not measure the reality of love by feelings, but by results. Feelings are very delusive. They often depend on mere natural temperament, and the devil wrests them to our hurt. A glowing imagination is apt to seek itself rather than God. But if you are earnest in striving to serve and endure for God’s sake, if you persevere amid temptation, dryness, weariness, and desolation, you may rest assured that your love is real.

Rapid I have moved along the byways of the world, for my time was not yet. Not so much like King David in the wilderness, before he was king, but not someone either who will come to nothing in the end, I think. I can hope. More than hope, for he who makes his future can best foretell what is to come: these the paths I blaze I know not if anyone has ever passed this way before, the road is rough and unkept. Sometimes to rest, look around me, just where I might be, not really to know until later that I had been in famous places, at times. This is the life I have chosen for myself, and I lament not that it takes me any length to achieve my destination. The journey may not be the reward at the end itself, ’tis true, but one must make delight of even a hard voyage. What else can we do? This is what life is, after all. Count it all joy.

Night falls, where serendipity has a home in the careful darkness.

Night falls, time that stands still, yet things happening everywhere.

Night falls, these little dooms we have grown used to, and ignore.

Night falls, and I light a candle by which to see myself, and wonder.

Night falls, dreams to intrude, entering the world through our hands.

Night falls, and I hold steady for a time, not to buckle before dawn.

Night falls, and nothing exists, and we are all ghosts in a ghost world.

Flyin’ to Seattle when I heard the news.
I can’t believe you’re gone, not the light I knew.

Some things get lost, some things just disappear,
But not my love for you, I’ll keep that close and near.
Some things just fade like scars and dreams,
I’ve got your heart right here with me.

I dialed your number on the phone yesterday,
Thinkin’ you would answer, and then I remembered.

– Alice Peacock

Markus Lüpertz: Untitled

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The Kingdom of Heaven that is within you: that is the love you have.

fade in the everlasting night, and the haunting moonglow
we have forgotten our names, echo only what the wind whispers
the candles here hold our very souls in their flickering flames