What moves us? You want to say something. And yet you don't. Maybe you can't. Face to face with a profound mystery what else can one do but stop, look, and listen! What does that say about you? God knows! Yes, that's it.I can say less and less about myself or anyone else. Doubt moves lovingly within a circle. Anyway, the ink is not dry. Even if essence is given, it unfolds in time. Only at the end of life can one say what life is, if at all. No? I have become a question to myself.
I stand before this picture, drawn to it. Here darkness is not 'nothingness', does not 'represent' it, nor is it a negation. And I have a strange but deep desire to be nothing, to literally walk into nothingness, this silent night or desert. Put all thought to one side, put the thought of no thought to one side...stand alone.
Can one distinguish between the qualities of light, how it slants, how it gently falls all around one? If so, then for darkness, too? There is something comforting, alluring or magnetic about it. There is a soft radiating warmth or degrees of humanity to the blackness, as if there was a sun behind it. The surface is neither shiny nor dull. Do not think of appearance or reality. No, just be.
No words. Religious, spiritual? What does it matter? No.5, the quintessential. What you need now is not light but silence, stillness. How you would dearly like to erase harsh words, bitter thoughts, undo the hardness of one's face. Here, finally, to walk in the forest, to lose my name, let my clothes fall to the ground, be your shadow, speak with you, face to face.
How can emptiness be so beautiful?
2 comments:
I would say that what you describe here says pretty much about you :-)
but how come you said you wanted me NOT to desire emptiness or stillness when I posted it about that?
hello, b :-)
the hardness of one's face can be undone if the hand remembers the loving caress.
Er..because other people's emptiness is so boring! :-)
Nah, only joshing.
but , no, it isn't emptiness as in a lack of something, not simply a 'negation' (i must go back to Levinas here) .You know, that was the strange thing about Rothko's paintings...there is no despair.."the night is also a sun".
and it's not just about standing alone, before a dark mirror or a window, but walking through it..to carry it with you (as Perseus carried the head of Medusa, perhaps)..it's not stillness or the desire for stillness but walking with another..'alone with the Alone'.
"I would say that what you describe here says pretty much about you :-)"
But yes, you've just "proved" my point -though I dislike that word immensely. It is only for another person to say what a person is..and that too can only be for a short while.
Denise Levertov says it better: we seek a witness to our streaming selves.
oh yes, hello!
salaams,
b.
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