A Beggar At Damascus Gate PART I

OVERTURE: Love is a constantly changing landscape

















"Lovers bring gifts to the beloved, gold and precious stones. This instant my love brought me the greatest gift of all. 'Open your hand,' he said... and placed in it a little white feather with specks of grey and black. I looked at him silent and uncomprehending. (10)"

"We were alone, locked in a desolate city of the dead, and the terror in me grew violent. I looked at his paleness, his frail, shuddering body pitted against a universe full of malice, and I asked myself, what chance he had of surviving this heaviness, of emerging from this dead world. (11-12)"

"Duplicity is an art raised even to the status of philosophy... the artist raises a screen and takes pleasure in playing games with his audience. (13)"

"Veiling your beliefs from the eyes of the vulgar is an act of self-preservation, thus avoiding the jealousy of men and gods. (13)"

"Does one sell his life for a poem? Or for a glimpse of water lilies in a pond? (17)"

"My vision is too limited to grasp the depth of her anguish and the fires that burn underneath. She can spread desolation around her with the same intensity as she does joy. I perceive the political animal behind the waif and the artist, but it is only at rare moments that she shines with a zeal for the cause... It is a martyr's zeal, which frightens me. What do I know of this glittering creature, for wherever I turn, only the top of the iceberg is revealed. (18)"

"Today I took leave of my double, 'Alex the Bad'. I banished him to the darkest corner of my being, where he will find no peace. I shall let him slumber in the deep with his sinister thoughts and heinous deeds. Today I have broken unwritten laws, not of my making, all because I took pity on 'Alex the Good' and his chagrin d'amour. (19)"

"He asked me to be careful of the written word, for words can invoke unknown forces. He implored me to be sparing, for he knew the magic power of the word. (25)"

Make Time (11/02/09)

I'm making time into a ball
composed of threads I've untied from my clothes
None of me pants or shirts (Which I
like to fit tight) are without holes
from the pulling of my body
on this outer layer

I wear clothes made from the fabric of time
I wear my knees and fall and make them bloody
I wear my shoulders like a harness in constant
flux/the equilibrium torn in the back of my shirt

To flex my muscles
and shed these awful garments
to breathe and bask in naked reassurance
and shed this awful time
Make it into a ball
and cast it away into the sky/a star
to add to those other marks/
the map of passing time

Make my ball a mark of time
an eternal flame which someone must observe
don't let it burn
let it glow
like a dead thing
with eyes like mine
set upon the face on the clock
waiting for that moment to be free
and, once it's here, for that moment to come again

Nietzsche

"The actor has spirit but little conscience of the spirit. Always he has faith in that with which he inspires the most faith - faith in himself. Tomorrow he has a new faith, the day after tomorrow a newer one. He has quick senses, like the people, and capricious moods. To overflow - that means to him: to prove. To drive to frenzy - that means to him: to persuade. And blood is to him the best of all reasons. A truth that slips into delicate ears alone he calls a lie and nothing. Verily, he believes only in gods who make a big noise in the world! (164)"

"Slow is the experience of all deep wells: long must they wait before they know what dell into their depth. (164)"

"Verily, the clever ego, the loveless ego that desires its own profit in the profit of the many - that is not the origin of the herd, but its going under. (172)"

"Higher than love of the neighbor is love of the farthest and the future; higher yet than the love of human beings I esteem the love of things and ghosts. This ghost that runs after you, my brother, is more beautiful than you; why do you not give him your flesh and your bones? But you are afraid and run to your neighbor... I teach you not the neighbor, but the friend. The friend should be the festival of the earth to you and an anticipation of the overman. I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart. But one must learn to be a sponge if one wants to be loved by hearts that overflow. I teach you the friend in whom the world stands completed, a bowl of goodness - the creating friend who always has a completed world to give away. And as the world rolled apart for him, it rolls together again in circles for him, as the becoming of the good through evil, as the becoming of purpose out of accident. (173-174)"

"Lonely one, you are going the way of the lover: yourself you love, and therefore you despise yourself, as only lovers despise. The lover would create because he despises. What does he know of love who did not have to despise precisely what he loved!... With my tears go into loneliness, my brother. I love him who wants to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes. (177)"

"A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything... Woman understands children better than man does, but man is more childlike than woman. In a real man a child is hidden - and wants to play... Let woman be a plaything, pure and fine, like a gem, irradiated by the virtues of a world that has not yet arrived. Let the radiance of a star shine through your love! Let your hope be: May I give birth to the overman! (178)"

"Tell me: how did gold attain the highest value? Because it is uncommon and useless and gleaming and gentle in its splendor; it always gives itself. Only as the image of the highest virtue did gold attain the highest value. Goldlike gleam the eyes of the giver. Golden splendor makes peace between moon and sun. Uncommon is the highest virtue and useless; it is gleaming and gentle in its splendor: a gift-giving virtue is the highest virtue. (186)"

"Wake and listen, you that are lonely! From the future come winds with secret wing-beats; and good tidings are proclaimed to delicate ears. You that are lonely today, you that are withdrawing, you shall one day be the people: out of you, who have chosen yourselves, there shall grow a chosen people - and out of them, the overman. Verily, the earth shall yet become a site of recovery. And even now a fragrance surrounds it, bringing salvation - and a new hope. (189)"

D-E-S-I-R-E

"The poet is in a sad state of 'wanting and not being able.' He hears the flow of great rivers, passing by in silence, with no one else to hear their music. On his brow he feels the coolness of the reeds, swaying in the No Man's Land. He wants to feel the dialogue of the winds that tremble in the moss... He wants to penetrate the music of the sap running in the dark silence of huge treetrunks... He wants to press his ear to the sleeping girl and understand the Morse code of her heart... He wants... But he cannot.(xi)"

"The tragic, awesome thing about the human heart and the incomprehensible, terrifying nature of human desire is that if men achieve the dreams they are yearning for, they feel no happier having possessed them... They feel an illusion that is their constant torment, and if, after much suffering, they achieve it, they find only the worst sort of ennui and disgust. This, which is so enormously painful and tragic, occurs both in the spiritual realm and in the physical. And thus the suffering caused by an absent love is useless and frightful. If a man loves intensely... when he possesses his constant pain his illusion is wiped away little by little, and when the sacrifice is consummated, his tower of desires and yearning comes tumbling down, and he is turned a into a man like any other. (xii)"

"With words one says human things. With music one expresses what no one knows or can define, but which exists in everyone with greater or lesser force. Music is the art par excellence. (xii)"

Deciduous Peaches (edit 9/23/09)

Deciduous Peaches

It's not easy to peak of love
to peaches once the fruit is consumed
leaving the pit in excess
Though devouring their skin is like
biting the neck
the flesh of love

The stones of the most delicious peaches
I carry around in my pocket
Each rub against the other
rub against my thumb
making the edges smooth
and the shell want to open
yet reveals little of love

A small girl sitting on a park-bench
gobbles at the tenuous flesh of a peach
The nectar dribbles from her face and
cheeks down her chin
all over her hands and her pretty/new dress
When she is finished
she places the stone on the bench
and licks her lips and sucks her fingers
What she knows of love
is how good it tastes
while it lingers in her mouth

The Final Resolution

The resolution has been made. I shall make it to the east coast. In one years time. Some morning. Just at day break. From the top of some peak. I will learn to fly to America.

The Possibility of Knowing Oneself

"Most [people] believe that it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man... Laws of imitation! Laws of fear... The fear of finding oneself alone - that is what they suffer from - and so they don't find themselves at all... One always has to be alone to invent anything - but they don't want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value - and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life. (89-90)"

"Of the thousand forms of life, each of us can know but one. It is madness to envy other people's happiness; one would not know what to do with it. Happiness won't come ready-made; it has to be made to measure... I have tried to cut out my happiness to fit me. (94)"

"Do you know the reason why poetry and philosophy are nothing but dead-letter nowadays? It is because they have severed themselves from life. In Greece, ideas went hand in hand with life; so that the artist's life itself was already a poetic realization, a philosopher's life a putting into action of his philosophy; in this way, as both philosophy and poetry took part in life, instead of remaining unaquainted with each other, philosophy provided food for poetry, and poetry gave expression to philosophy... Nowadays beauty no longer acts; action no longer desires to be beautiful; and wisdom works in a sphere apart. (95)"

"I should be afraid of preventing the future and allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour's freshness. It is never enough for me to have been happy. I do not believe in dead things and cannot distinguish between being no more and never having been. (95)"

Quotes from André Gide's The Immoralist

America; Land of Dreams; Castles in Spain and in the Sky; Catalonia

"I'm off to foreign lands, brother... To America... But why is it the wrong place... Well, never mind, brother. It's a good place. If they start asking you, just tell them he went to America. (511)" - Last words from Svidrigailov, character in Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment

Napolean says: From the sublime to the ridiculous there is only one step

"[Ordinary people are] always master of the present; the [extraordinary] master of the future. The first preserves the world and increases it numerically; the second moves the world and leads it toward a goal. (261)" -Dostoevsky

I'm a ghost man in a ghost town and I don't know how to get out and get up to heaven

"Ghosts are, so to speak, bits and pieces of other worlds, their beginnings. The healthy man, naturally, has no call to see them, because the healthy man is the most earthly of men, and therefore he ought to live according to life here, for the sake of completeness and order. Well, but as soon as a man gets sick, as soon as the normal earthly order of his organism is disrupted, the possibility of another world at once begins to make itself known, and the sicker one is, the greater the contact with this other world, so that when a man dies altogether, he goes to the other world directly. (289)" - Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment

Lies <=> Truth

"I like it when people lie! Lying is man's only privilege over all other organisms. If you lie - you get to the truth! Lying is what makes me a man. Not one truth has ever been reached without first lying fourteen times or so, maybe a hundred and fourteen, and that's honorable in its way; well, but we can't even lie with our own minds! Lie to me, but in your own way, and I'll kiss you for it. Lying in one's own way is almost better than telling the truth in someone else's way; in the first case you're a man, and in the second - no better than a bird! The truth won't go away, but life can be nailed shut...In the end we'll lie our way to the truth, because we are on a noble path. (202-204)"

Where You Go I Go Too

I'm sure long before this one I had many other dreams, but this is the very first dream I can remember. It shows me that I haven't changed much in my way of thinking and forming desirous relationships since I was 4 years old. There was a young girl, my age, in my preschool class, blond curly hair. I remember her face generally other than it was like most of the faces belonging to children of a young age; cute and chubby with large eyes. But for me at that time her face possessed a magical quality.

In my dream she was standing on a balcony on the second story of a white colonial house. Her hair was curled in amber ringlets and she wore a blue dress in the style certainly before the civil war of a southern belle adorned with organdy ruffles and exposing her shoulders. What is odd is I am not sure how such details could have come into my mind. At four years old I had little knowledge of time or history yet there she was standing looking out from the picket fence lined portico as I held her in my mind. Nothing else happened.

Truth is I'm sure I hadn't spoken five words to her while we were in the class. Certainly I was too shy and when I did come in contact with her I could do nothing but admire her.

I can understand why my friends say I am a hopeless romantic (even though some haven't actually said it too me). But it makes sense. I've always been this way. Waking up in memories and dreams of thirsting for people I barely know. How to change? How to change? Can I? Do I want to? One thing I am certain of is I will keep this girl with me all of my life. As some kind of archetype. As my first memory of longing and the beginning of my hopeless romance. Where I go she goes too.

Square Foot of Space

"Where was it that I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet- and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him- and had so stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity, it would be better to live than to die right now! Only to live, to live to live! To live, no matter how-only to live!(158)" - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Bouquet (8/3/2009)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentioning eighteenth century attire has me wondering of floral arrangements. "Her bouquet" what could her bouquet be? Something she wears, supporting her bosom, the flower of her body? She hands me her bouquet - offering me her flesh. A word; possession. It was enough for me not to grab, but rather to hold her by the stems and feel the petals brush against my skin. ("You were always weird that I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now") No expectations. The curves of her body, her energy, I could feel inside her. I felt inside. Yet surrounded her. We danced and laughed, and and pressed out mouths together, we met each other and met ourselves again. The blue lights are bright. We should be the masters of the lights of the world. We speak it and we are.

She offered her bouquet to me and I took only a garland of baby's-breath. 'Tis sweet to leave love wanting more. Take little now. Gain more as they grow. She grows basil and carrots, hyssop-mint and other plants on the fire-escape of her apartment in Brooklyn. Grows them in her garden. To taste those herbs! To hold in my mouth that passion of inspiration, to hold the initial moment she conceived the idea of growing plants then in my mouth now will be my most sought delight. The experience.

The bouquet unfurls from the cleavage of her shirt. The stems are her neck, strong muscular and stretched taut. Careening. The flowers her face, high cheeks, chin, fiery nectar lips and iris eyes of amber glow like sunlight. But I do not possess. For there is very little in life for anyone to. I see. I admire. I am aware of beauty in things, the valuable symbols they possess. Like flowers gathering in my mind, ones already grown and planted somewhere else; those I have conceived without sight. Perhaps she will see them tomorrow in the city street in a bed outside of a building. Perhaps she will see them tomorrow of the next day and think of me.

Crushing Hard & The Muse

Somehow I feel very close with my craft and at the same time very far away. Somehow I know her but she is too distant from me to get at her and really know her. The duality of this paradigm is not as separate as it may seem. Like Plotinus' fire, only light exists. Therefore darkness is merely the absence of light. Light being truth, the absence of light being the absence of truth.

The truth is I have much to learn. My muse will bring me closer to the light.

Hesiod, the Greek poet said of the muses, "They are all of one mind, their hearts are set upon song and their spirit is free from care. He is happy whom the Muses love. For though a man has sorrow and grief in his soul, yet when the servant of the Muses sings, at once he forgets his dark thoughts and remembers not his troubles. Such is the holy gift of the Muses to men. (40 Edith Hamilton's Mythology)"

Light and the Happiest Day of my Life

"We are not separated from spirit, we are in it."
"Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sun-like, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful."
-Plotinus 3rd Century AD

Everything I have witnessed of life leads me to believe in energy. That all living things physical or symbolic exude some amount of energy, a light invisible to the human eye but visible in the universal eye. Perhaps it is an effect of the stars in the sky of endless space, perhaps the tiny atoms floating around us constantly effecting each other unnoticed, perhaps its our human awareness of its existence. As if each of us could sense the others light or that each of our lights were somehow attracted to each other.

Human Soul

"Pick two twinkling points of obsolete light in the sky above us. It doesn't matter what they are, except that they must twinkle. If they don't twinkle they are either planets or satellites...Now then: Whatever heavenly bodies those two glints represent, it is certain that the Universe has become so rarefied that for light to go from one to the other would take thousands or millions of years. But I now ask you to look precisely at one, and then precisely at the other...It took a second, do you think?...Even if you'd taken an hour something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at, conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light...Your awareness. That is the new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness...I have thought of a better word than awareness. Let us call it soul. (242-243)" - Kurt Vonnegut as Kilgore Trout

Rousseau's Cunning

"In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king; I passed for a good teacher, because the rest in the town were bad. (181)"

"To try and make young people attend to the lesson you wish to give them by dangling in front of their eyes the prospect of something very interesting to follow is a most common mistake in teachers. (186)"

Land of Castles

"I love this," M said letting out a sigh and pressed up against her friends. The three of them seated in the backseat of E's coupe smoking. It seemed other-worldly, careless almost completely European, like siblings embracing each other in each their own way. Michigan summer air is damp and sexy and full of unknowns.

Wouldn't know who Eugene Debs was without Vonnegut

"Where there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am in it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." -Eugene Debs (p 142 Vonnegut's Timequake)

Shape of Women

"I say that when couples fight, it isn't about money or sex or power. What they're really saying is, 'You're not enough people!' Sigmund Freud said he didn't know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to... I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can't get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz (94-96 Timequake)

Appoggiatura

Appoggiatura - \ə-ˌpä-jə-ˈtu̇r-ə\ - noun
(1)an embellishing note or tone preceding an essential melodic note or tone and usually written as a note of smaller size (Merriam-Webster)
(2)"grace note" (57 Timequake); word or phrase characteristic to an individual's conversational language

The Human Tendency To Imitate Strangers, To Travel And Exchange

"Acculturated persons are those who find that they are no longer treated as the sort of people they thought they were, because the outside world has changed. An economic misfortune or a new technology, or being conquered by another country or political faction... If I hadn't learned to live without a culture and a society, acculturation would have broken my haert a thousand times.(32)" - Vonnegut's Timequake

Moral Dualism: The Benevolent & The Malignant

"In the beginning there was absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing. But nothing implies something, just as up implies down and sweet implies sour, as man implies woman and drunk implies sober and happy implies sad. I hat to tell you this, friends and neighbors, but we are teensy-weensy implications in an enormous implication. If you don't like it here, why don't you go back to where you came from?

"The first something to be implied by all the nothing was in fact two somethings, who were God and Satan. God was male. Satan was female. They implied each other, and hence were peers in the emerging power structure, which was itself nothing but an implication. Power was implied by weakness.

"God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Satan could have done this herself, but she thought it was stupid, action for the sake of action. What was the point? She didn't say anything at first.

"But Satan began to worry about God when He said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. She had to wonder, 'What in heck does He think He's doing? How far does He intend to go, and does He epect me to help Him take care of all this crazy stuff?'

"And then the shit really hit the fan. God made man and woman, beautiful little miniatures of Him and her, and turned them loose to see what might become of them. The Garden of Eden might be considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games.

"Satan couldn't undo anything God had done. She could at least try to make existence for His little toys less painful. She could see what He couldn't: To be alive was to be either bored or scared stiff. So she filled an apple with all sorts of ideas that might at least relieve the boredom, such as rules for games with cards and dice, and how to fuck, and recipes for beer and wine and whiskey, and pictures of different plants that were smokable, and so on. And instructions on how to make music and sing and dance real crazy, real sexy. And how to spout blasphemy when they stubbed their toes.

"Satan had a serpent give Eve the apple. Eve took a bite and handed it to Adam. He took a bite, and then they fucked.

"I grant you that some of the ideas in the apple had catastrophic effects for a minority of those who tried them.

"All Satan wanted to do was help, and she did in many cases. And her record for promoting nostrums with occasionally dreadful side effects is no worse than that of the most reputable pharmaceutical houses of the present day. (28-30)" -Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake

The Effects of Health, Youth and Idleness

"I was restless, absent-minded, and dreamy; I wept and sighed and longed for pleasure which I could not imagine but of which I nevertheless felt the lack. This state is indescribable; and few men can even have any conception of it. For most of them have anticipated this overflowing of life, which is both delicious and tormenting, and which, in the intoxication of desire, gives one a foretaste of gratification. The heat in my blood incessantly filled my mind with pictures of women and girls. But not knowing the true nature of sex I imagined them acting according to my own strange fantasies, and had no idea of anything else. (90)" -Rousseau's Confessions