Grief I. / II. / III.
At this moment, I am stricken with grief. Roland Barthes had a diary for his, when his mother died. Should I do the same? – I don’t know. I know nothing. I feel nothing but grief, omnipresent, all-consuming. It’s a dark shroud, enveloping me and slowly replacing me with itself, while I fade into oblivion. The shroud is my mourning dress: but it is an empty shell. I am only a shadow, I am transparent, I am a fleeting thought, and now I am gone. All thoughts have transformed into ungraspable wisps, dancing around in a dark forest, mis-leading travellers to their certain doom. I am one of these misguided travellers. I always have been.
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22.7.
The silence is blinding, deafening, stifling. It is choking in the blistering heat of these still summer days. The air is thick with foreboding gloom and in a feverish disposition; it is like a heavy, leaden blanket whose weight consists of bleak apathy and a general world-weariness. No clouds which could make their way across the sky and carry the hope of a silver lining. No rustling whispers in the trees, which would carry the promise of change. No movement. Only stillness. Silence.
— 25.09.15
There’s a certain vanity involved in suffering, one would think: A sense of Weltschmerz; a noble martyrdom; a certain self-pity that elevates you above the suffering of others, making yours seem more noble, more aesthetic, treading on the sacred grounds of art. The suffering of poets and painters, it would seem, must have been a different one than that of the common people: A sublime of suffering, a divinity in desperation. But this is a shallow delusion, really.
There is no nobility in grief: it is devastating, all-consuming. It is a radical despot, choking every last flickering ember of hope until there is nothing left but cold, dead ashes. It is an inexorable, merciless storm which sucks out the breath and lifeblood of all living things and leaves nothing behind but a drained, barren wasteland.
In grief, much like in death, we are equal.
Dreaming Trees
(From: An alarming number of confessional monologues, April 8th 2015)
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How do you count the musings of a muse?
How do you quantify the song of a songbird? – The eyes of Argus are always watching.
Today, I let work be work and, with my eyes closed, I enjoyed the dry rain of the sycamores. Their song is eternal: it never preaches, it never judges. It simply goes on, faintly whispering its silent secrets, passing them on and on from one zephyr to the next, on a cyclic, never-ending journey.
Sometimes I wonder whether Argyle knew about all of this. I wonder if he ever asked Jupiter: “Jupiter, have you ever listened to the sycamores, and wondered what they are always on about? It’s like they know all the secrets in the world, but they’re never telling. It’s strange, you know. You never stop to think about it, and once you do, you just so happen to have passed the right moment; you miss it by just an instant. And then it’s gone, and you forget what you were thinking about; and then you shrug thinking it couldn’t have been anything important, and then you keep on going about your day. That’s just the way things go sometimes, you know. Some people never find the right moment, because they’re impatient and they never wait long enough for anything significant to happen. They lose patience. But me, I’m different I think. Sometimes, I wonder whether I miss it because I always wait for too long, and then it passes me by, and before I realize that it occurred, it’s already gone again; it went away never to return.”
And then, what would Jupiter have said?
Jupiter is not a type of many words. I wonder what he would have said, but to be entirely truthful with you, I don’t know. Couldn’t imagine. He’s a strange one, it’s often difficult to figure out what he is thinking.
And so, while the sycamores were whispering and while Argyle kept on contemplating the meaning of his existence in my imagination, the heavy curtains of nightfall began to draw over the land. Eventually, I left my secretive friends to find more elusive company: I quickly grow weary of substance and stability; of intelligible truth. I always tend to leave it for a more undefinable essence which never runs in danger of boring me with its irritable explicability. I guess I just can’t help it.