Sepulchral frost

Sepulchral Frost

The gravestone’s coldness dissects streams of wind.

In solitude’s transparency a sepulchral rainfall bursts.

And on the headstone of my last resort

An inscription shines, hidden by withered leafs.

Six feet under the ground: it lies, consumed by worms,

Covered with loose, airy earth, with eyelids eaten away:

My corpse, forsaken organic matter,

That ceased to act as a living embodiment of mind-body unity;

That is simply a rotten mass feasted by Nature,

Out of which my corpse emerged some years ago,

While still being alive, hurrying to live, spurting towards joys

And sorrows of yet another illusion called the life path

Of an isolated personality that grows and develops under the blue sky,

The moon and the stars that shine with an elusive mystery,

The mystery which is so easy to miss in the face of the enchanted

Vibrating web of meanings that we weave as we dwell in our collective dreaming.

In my heart, ever since the moment of my birth, there was this sepulchral frost,

And behind the left shoulder, near my ear, I felt someone’s breathing,

And someone’s whisper pontificated to me that, while being alive,

Somewhere there, very near, right in my Heart

I’ve never been born. And my hour has struck but nothing changed:

All these years were dreamt by me when my body was already enthralled

By this cadaveric freeze. Another day on the planet Earth,

In the Milky Way galaxy, on the outskirts of this universe

Was lived by me. In vain or not in vain, that is the question of no significance

On the back of the monumental triumph of kosmic void

And her unstoppable life, in contrast to which I am only

A weak shimmering of a body shell swept away by a blink of Eternity.

Let the memory of me as of an unnoted sparkle remain

In the great sentient archives of the undying Kosmos.

And one day when the right time comes the good I’ve done here and now

Will grow into a gigantic wave, humongous sea of Goodness

Which will destroy all ignorance and bring eternal peace and joy—

At least for a moment. And I will cry for all the cursed and all the blessed.

April 27, 2010 

(translated from Russian)

Neruda's mysticism

The perception of the world as a mystery is that which some poets intuit and cultivate in their writing. I stumbled upon a very beautiful poem by Pablo Neruda yesterday.

Poetry

And it was at that age... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.

On December 13, 1971, Pablo Neruda gave the Noble lecture. In it there are these especially remarkable lines:

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song—but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.

Such is Neruda's gentle mysticism.

The wind is blowing

When I look at you, multiple perspectives converge in the same moment. All these perspectives point to different planes of being; and the same action is reflected in all the dimensions simultaneously.

On the level of the bodily self, when I look at you, I feel my heart is pumping; and—say, you're a beautiful girl—I feel warmth all over my body and an unbearable attraction towards yours, the unmistakable desire to touch your skin and smell your hair and give you a hug and cuddle with you right now. On the level of the emotional self, I'm overwhelmed with experiences of joys and sorrows and fears and amusements and (dis)satisfactions and pleasures; and if you reciprocally express some emotions to me, I feel emotionally connected to you: I smile. On the mental level, I want to communicate and compare my concepts and networks of ideas about the world against yours, so that the opposites meet and syntheses emerge; I want to verbalize my worldview, resonate with yours, dive into your conceptual systems and understand them both from within and without; and on that level there's nothing sexier than if you do the same for me. On the level of the soul, it's the light that I feel inside myself and yourself; it's the ever-changing dance we are both enjoying in the reflection of each other... and yet at the same time it is the ultimate supraprofessional poker tournament, when we sit at the poker table in front of each other, looking eternally after each other, smoking cigars and impartially bluffing while playing our card and staking multiple universes of experience and individual lives against each other. And when you playfully bluff, I look into your eyes, and the keyless gate opens, letting in the space that flows through me as I disappear into the spectrum of infinite humming Light pulsating in the void of cessation. The ever-present Silence knocks me out. And then, during the infinity of non-being, I playfully re-emerge as the eternal recurrence into multitudes of selves here and there. And still there's no wind, there's only the blowing.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

"Why is there something rather than nothing?" Schelling asked. Is there any other question worth asking?

The question itself is pointing to the mystery of what is, of what ever had been and ever will be. The question is the heartbeat of the ever-present wonder of being alive. The question is a pointing out instruction, it's the instruction that points to the dark side of the moon of everyday living. This dark side is that which remains unseen but which nevertheless exists and whispers mysterious syllables into your ears. That whisper is something that raises profound curiosity in your soul. The state of being curious catalyzes an opening to something far beyond the trance of ordinary life. This curiosity feels as something that life is about. It is about showing interest in life's secrets. To see a mystery in the ordinary, to recognize the depth beneath the surface of mirrors staring at each other means to accept responsibility for the unfolding of one's own life, moment by moment by moment. Digging up the grave of your being, coming out of the casket of your hiding is what brings you into this brand new world of darkness and luminosity.

Writing poems of appreciation and singing songs of love, interweaving different perspectives on existence with each other in an ultimate fluctuating synthesis is a way of showing our gratitude to that great dialogical nature of creation. And when you get this, you're approaching the turbulence that is destined to shake all your previous assumptions and attachments through death and rebirth of something that's ready for fun and spontaneous dance of forms. The whirlpool of change, the tornado of transmutation. Be willing to sacrifice your hut for a palace and your palace for the universe. Why not let go, indeed?