[Book.]

Nothing to see here, any mirror says more.

What is it I long for, far within my unsearchable waters? We who refuse to open our eyes, lest we believe and be saved…. I remember reading about this woman who lived another complete life in her dreams: she had her waking husband and kids, and house and all; and then she had a second family, a second house, to which she’d return when she said goodnight to the first. What did I, myself, lose to the dreaming? Perhaps nothing so well formed, but some kind of blunt, primordial fire that extinguished itself for my fear of it, fear of any kind of passion? And I will never now be comforted, for what I lost was the torch that led me out of the wilderness, and I am lost in the dark wood of myself, unable to care. (Where am I?)

Bernard [of Clairvaux] did not stop with love for God or Christ, he insisted also that the Christian must love his neighbors, including even his enemies. Not necessarily that he must feel affection for them — that is not always possible in this life, though it will be in heaven — but that he must treat them as love dictates, doing always for others what he would that they should do for him.

you cannot be a hero without you have humanity
do not wish for ultimate challenges while failing the small ones
learn how it is that merely to stand is sometimes victory

The real clue is in knowing that you are clueless. The real wisdom to realize you are an idiot.

[Book.]

We become who we are in the dreams we forget.

This morning, I woke up and my heart was inexplicably broken. As if the moonlight cast in the window reminded me of someone I’d never known, a secret I’d kept from myself. Pain removes the reason from us. We are lost in wondering why, nowhere a viable foothold, to slip between the lines on the uncertain page. How does one truly empty his mind? It seems that the only recourse is distraction, to fill it instead with something else, to escape your regular sights and sounds to expose the imagination to novelty. It was still dark out when I awoke, some strange 4am glowing red in the clock by my bed — a hint of an archaic weird. The brokenness inside compelled me, then, and that is all that my memory would keep of the hour I spent between there and here, otherwise a numb blank is all that’s stored.

[More book.]

Time plays tricks on us.

Vague, the meanings that trickle in. I stare in the window, understanding that everyone is selling something. And a lot of us do better at it not actually realizing that little tidbit of existentialism. There are photos of people on display in front of me, of individuals decked out in robes and mortarboards, wearing clean dark suits and bright ties, groups of people who must be related to each other in some how and feinting some kind of sterile smile, women in white white wedding dresses, singled out relatives in front of subdued velvet purple backdrops. Yes, a photographer’s window. He’s selling you memories that he’s concocted, of scenes that would never have happened without that he had set them up. Arranged a bit of your life for you, in simulated perfection. One of the many people we pay to lie to us.

...live like you mean it

– Goo Goo Dolls

Gerhard Richter: Madrid, 1964

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embers of a dream, and firelight
the years slouch on, the world becomes shorter as we age
from the ground lifted, forgetting our yesterday’s weight
(did we even exist in that ambiguous time?)
faith in my inmost inmost fires
home to a thousand unnamed words, a vocabulary of silence
compelled by the illusion of time to accelerate my wondering
(imagine time, wrapped around itself: a rose)
we live our lives shrouded in sound
darkness slips from our grasping; we hold nothing at all
the transience of the dream, glances off our perceptions
(returned from nowhere, the moment is blank)

The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief.

In the dreaming, I stared at myself so intently that I burst into light.

In the dreaming, a hundred birds came together to form an angel in the air.

In the dreaming, a thousand candles hung in the air and flickered silently.

In the dreaming, I looked down a bottomless pit and saw the end of the world.

In the dreaming, water flowed through the skies in branches like trees.

In the dreaming, I screamed so loud that I cracked clouds open.

In the dreaming, I was alone in a vast darkness, yet hope would not die.

[More of that book I’m writing.]

Or am I no one?

Mornings walking through the false dawn Sunday, downtown: amazing how the city can be this quiet. Almost like time moved on without me, and I am the omega man stranded forever in the past. The daydream is too much like the outside world, and I am confused of whether the art of my mind is telling me something about that world, or that the world tells me this other place, inside me, exists somewhere in the commons of all dreaming. I know I speak too much about the dream. It is perhaps the condition of my misspent youth in the last part of the twentieth century, when all around seemed as if it were of a great dream that had been lost. We had to come up with our own; the collective unconscious had nothing to offer us…. And now I realize I don’t know what store it is that I am peering through the window of. A momentary blank.

There is no question, love is the answer.

all that we are ever promised is that life will go on
civilizations may fall, but always, the end is still not yet
the continuity of the stream flows its ceaseless logic

There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done

And they’re only going to change this place by
Killing everybody in the human race
And they would kill me for a cigarette
But I don’t even wanna die just yet

– The Police

Mordecai Ardon: The Red Dew

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