Distorted reality

With every thrust
I can feel myself passing
through your crawled field

the wheat long ago
has rotted
from the moisture and the rains

I’m hustling
in others’ castings,
so uncomfortable

I hate you

I can feel
my last muscle
being eaten
by the hunger

Every night
I open
look at
and close
fridge full of
requests

To have
someone to
cook for
means to love

I
resent
myself

13 stairs
lead to the gallows

the boundary between
life and death
isn’t linear
but circular

at 12 you reach
the end of the cycle
at 13 you will
be reborn

The Great Fires

Love is apart from all things.

Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.

It is not the body that finds love.

What leads us there is the body.

What is not love provokes it.

What is not love quenches it.

Love lays hold of everything we know.

The passions which are called love

also change everything to a newness

at first. Passion is clearly the path

but does not bring us to love.

It opens the castle of our spirit

so that we might find the love which is

a mystery hidden there.

Love is one of many great fires.

Passion is a fire made of many woods,

each of which gives off its special odor

so we can know the many kinds

that are not love. Passion is the paper

and twigs that kindle the flames

but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes

because it tries to be love.

Love is eaten away by appetite.

Love does not last, but it is different

from the passions that do not last.

Love lasts by not lasting.

Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire

for his sins. Love allows us to walk

in the sweet music of our particular heart.

Jack Gilbert

howieabel:

“Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. They learn more and more that their group is right, that its actions are justified; thus their beliefs are strengthened. At the same time, such propaganda contains elements of criticism and refutation of other groups, which will never be read or heard by a member of another group…Thus we see before our eyes how a world of closed minds establishes itself, a world in which everybody talks to himself, everybody constantly views his own certainty about himself and the wrongs done him by the Others - a world in which nobody listens to anybody else.”
― Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes

“A quarter of me is the fruit of heredity, another of the environment, third - of chance. So I’m only responsible for a quarter of my being.”

- Akutagawa Ryunosuke

Is there something in human life that is wonderful, regardless of the subject’s judgement?

“A clown who amuses the audience in a circus is forced to train himself as a clown around the clock, without knowing rest, otherwise he will not be able to compete with other, more diligent clowns and will go down one step, put on a janitor’s uniform instead of a jester’s cap with bells. And therefore he is always and everywhere - just a clown. He no longer has time or energy for anything else. Exactly the same bourgeois society does with a banker, a highly paid lackey, an engineer, and a mathematician. The capitalist method of division of labor does not know and does not tolerate exceptions. Therefore, professional cretinism turns here not only into a fact, but also into a virtue, into a norm, even into a kind of ideal, into a principle of personality education, to which everyone tries to comply so as not to sink to the very bottom of society, not to become a simple, unskilled labor force.”

- Evald Ilyenkov

The pandemic is leaving us to face our worst habits and things in us we try to change so bad.

Do I want to become better version of myself? Do I try enough?

It’s not about the attempts done, nor the effort put. This part has been growing in you more and more during the years but you’ve been accustomed to the previous way of living and managing to limit the bad habit.

Now with the way of life being changed, the bad habits try to stretch to every possible corner of your new free time and to become bigger part of your personality.

Will I manage to limit the parts of me that I hate in a new way or I will symbiose with them to a new person - only time can tell. But I will not surrender that easily.