And the judgment is this: the light has come into the world, but men have preferred darkness to light — John 3:19
Her face, that day when I met her, seemed to contain everything.
She tilted her head making the attention pass from one end of the mind to the other, as if she managed to keep every action suspended from a thread on which everything slipped like drops of water. She narrowed her eyelids a little, “to hear the dripping” she said, that was beating warmly on the edge of the roof of the room and on the large windows darkened by the sublimation of the water.
At first, I was afraid of her.
How to be afraid of such sweetness? Now I think I can say, with a little shyness, that enormous things always frighten, tear our reason and render us helpless, without the weapons of our mind, and like children or animals we crouch in the covered areas that seem to us more protected.
Light is not only absolute, categorical truth: it is an unmasking, a lack of protection, until we adapt to it and becomes protection itself. In the light, it must be admitted, it is immediate, ineluctable. Doubt clears up and the shadowy corners shine even for the eye that doesn’t want to look. It is complete enforced honesty. The biggest violation melts into the awareness of the lack of judgment, of the observer, of the public; when we get rid of all skin, nothing remains but the non-existent matter of light itself. Isn’t this perhaps the greatest desire and fear? Knowing is human weakness, and observing oneself, naked, would mean observing the whole knowable world. Where does this fear of finally grasping the finish line come from? It is great and terrible to savor the joy of conclusion.
She moved walking with the muffled silence of dreams “what the air does not touch does not create noise”, she emphasized to narrate her eternally ephemeral nature. What doesn’t sound, does exist? What is not defined by the boundaries on which the air bounces, is it currently something? It terrifies, that presence, under my hard roof. “O vast Lady, what (sacred?) Motive leads you to this humble abode?”. How do you address the gods? How do we address everything we are subjected to?
She smiled as the sun can smile, or as the starry sky smiles on a summer night, when the moods of the earth are relieved, after so many sighs. “I know your thirst and your heart, your infinite words that you cannot” and her lips open “you do not desire to stop. Come.” I approached full of tremors, and her spring lips whispered to my human soul:
On striving towards Infinity:
In space, (the physical place where the planets are positioned) the Infinite does not exist. It is a simple fact. In its immense forms and titanic faces all of a sudden it has a limit, a boundary that delimits its existence, separating it from the absolute, affirming its identification as space, as a place. How then can we deny that so naive and human belief in the infinite? Certainly, the constant path and spatial expansion is also very close, but it cannot and must not be mixed into infinity since it would no longer be a place, an essential container for our former existence. Therefore, the Infinite is not tangible, since to be tangible it should be matter and therefore border with an end. The boundary delineates the presence of something. Without a border it is nothing, or everything. The border not only outlines the presence of something, but also something that indicates the border and separates the newly born something from something else, confined to something. It is necessary to be something to be recognized and therefore to exist. Why must it be recognized?
Existence implies a name, existence without a name and non-identifiable are not possible. Every existence lives through correspondence with an ecosystem, life in relation to any society is necessary. Whether this is made up of animals or men, or plants, or stars and gases, existence will be recognized, and therefore, a name will also be tacitly given. Even the unknown has it, “unknown”. It is not possible to exist, like all beings, outside a society, a system, a chain. Everything is part of a composite environment of different things that enter into relationship with each other. By deliberately separating from this, there would in any case be a relationship with it, a relationship of separation, but a relationship in any case. The insurmountable relationship would automatically give birth to a way to recognize, and therefore, a name: existing.
The decision-making capacity, and actions, live in relation to an environment, and therefore, consequently, if not recognized (and not identified) the subject is non-existent, because it is unable to influence either his own self or the world in any way.
The name characterizes the essence and radicalizes it. If this were different, it would modify the existence of the subject, its own being, in an equally radical way.
The name is therefore given by the relationship that existing things have between them, that something, delimited by the boundary (which we recognize, and we call boundary), just called, exists.
Secondly, the Infinite cannot be mobile: if it were, it would always become something else, changing its nature, and becoming something different from what it already is.
Time is, without a doubt, eternal. Even before its birth, timeless time had a reason to exist. Time is not only finally Infinite — therefore understandable to us — but it is also not continuous, but momentary, inasmuch as it is Infinite already pre-existing and not in creation. Time is a mobile illusion of the Infinite, marked by the count of human and non-human state changes, whose objectivity is distorted by the subjective perception of the infinitesimally small.
Infinitely small, but still, like every detail, part of the cosmic order — or disorder — crossed by the same basic energy, the clarification of which is essential in order to be able to even hint at the tendency towards the Infinite typical of being. Humans, which, like every existing being and non-being, inevitably tends to be part of the entirety of the Universe, to be part of the mire of existence (being) whose final form is the act of existing in the whole.
What, then, is what prevents man from being present as One and All? Why it is needed? Perhaps the original binder, energy, gives beings the vibrant need for closeness, to be incorporated, almost like a universe-phage, close to the need for consumption for replacement and survival. Being part of the universe is a necessity. Man needs to survive, this explains the urge to unite — to return, or to be part of — the One. So what blocks Man? What differentiates him from the rest, which he feels as part of the Universe, of the Infinite? Why is he the only one excluded from this living choir?
Himself.
Man convinced that he is different from the rest excludes himself from the world, the presumption of the victim in its purest and not abstract form. Man is forced to the margins of the Universe by man himself, he keeps himself confined and chained, tending towards an idea of Infinity that he is no longer even capable of identifying. He decides what are the starting and ending points of existence without consulting the world, arrogantly enveloping himself in complex projects and ideas, such as the soul, transmutations, total negations, certain truths, ignoring the simplicity of reality, matter, continuous change of the corporeal reality, which already makes it without doubt, part of the Universe and therefore of the Infinite.
This dichotomy of man who has moved away from the world and is already part of the world is coexisting. How can man avoid hindering reality and abandon himself to its acceptance? (of himself?)
On the lightning:
The Snake basks under the fierce ray of the sun. Elastic and fast, she savors the burning boulders and the banks of the ponds in August, earthy and thirsty, where the slimy frogs and amphibious plants drink the sap of the waters. As soon as she arrived among the worlds, she still does not know the thunder and the rain except that which cicadas sound hidden among the leaves; she winds her scaly among the fragrant herbs, undecided whether to love what warms her or to hate her necessary addiction, but soon, coiling herself warmly in her lair, she sleeps forgetting the doubt and fear of the predator that with sharp eyes hovers over the countryside and the fresh woods, up to the pinnacles, which the Snake does not know, cannot see, cannot imagine, and does not even bother to do so.
Her days pass, few but slow; how long and short a serpent’s day. She fills her mouth with other people’s rodents and eggs, loses her rough skin as she wastes time among the brushwood; she envies the flowers that fold the sweet rushes in the fields. Or, if she only had petals! She might be soft too. She pines and writhes in moments, but when she hears the whistle of the eagle or the hawk she hides among the thorny shrubs, and the flowers are forgotten among the herbs that she cannot care about. When she sees the sweet buds burned and tortured by the cruel season, she enjoys an unhealthy, feverish joy, a hissing vengeance of jealousy.
August is like a fickle young man, and when he warms up he keeps the anger in his thoughts that he reluctantly ignores and drives away as fast as a snake running away from a bird of prey. Swollen the clouds accumulate to cry for the sorrows that lurk in the celestial chest.
The Snake does not know the world beyond the boulders, she does not care about the sky. She slips empty along the thistles and straw-colored mouse tails, she flows quickly among the animal crowd of the plain, which is not silent, but alive in the fresh and inhospitable morning, electric and affected, is preparing to welcome the tears of meteorological lamentations. The Snake does not understand except that in the high air she dances the whistle of her evil and that her lair is there, far away among the thorns.
The more she does not hear and does not feel. A scream is thunder, a voice of a god. As if the whole vault threw itself on the little Snake, broke on the branches, set the sky on fire.
With closed eyes the Snake cries: is this death? The ticking on her scaly skin, the liquid cold: time left? a cruel poison? she knows the rain.
O, how much she repents! She shouldn’t have smiled at the innocent death of friends flowers, now she is being punished! Now it’s her unhappy turn.
But as she trembles, she naked her skin becomes fleshy and the scales float in the rivulets of the flowing earth. Curled up, the Snake beats her eyelashes decorated with drops, she feels the fingers of the sky on her broad back. In her hands veins and watery sap: not a flower was given from heaven, but a nymph.
This is life, the Nymph thinks: improvise. To understand its sweetness, you stop and listen to its intimate nature as it appears, the factual reality. It is always clearer and purer than what our mind creates for us.
Oration between heaven and a monk:
Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla (Long is the teacher’s way by means of theory, short and effective by means of example) — Lucius Anneus Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium
Act I
scene: beach by the sea. Time is troubled. Clouds gather on the horizon. The wind blows on the head of the monk who walks with his face down on the coast line immersed in his own thoughts. He looks up absorbed towards the sea and then the sky. It thunders.
monk: It seems almost a pity to stain with verbs this thunderous speech with which you drown the earth and the sea, oh Heaven.
sky:
monk: But in the solitude of my pensive wandering, your voice was like a gentle but certain answer to the questions that clog my mind, so I wonder if maybe you don’t want your cloudy monologue to be interrupted.
sky:
monk: Which does not show your great magnanimity and sweetness towards the creatures you protect under your inscrutable gaze.
sky: (thunders, violently, interrupting the monk)
monk: (to himself) no praise if possible.
(to the sky) O thundering Aer, you will have heard my doubts if you complained so much with your hoarse voice the line of my thoughts, and therefore what did you dwell on? What did you find worthy of your attention, among the many and immense doubts like the wastelands; without holds? Perhaps you saw the clear answers, evident but lacking the will that convinces the seeker? I do not want to know. (Since I believe you have whatever answer I long for.) In your leaden mood can you possibly show me why the goodness of the world sometimes escapes me? Or why is the will swept away like the fragments of the past year by the broom of desire like sand enslaved by the wind? Because I know that this happens, it seems inevitable, that the instinct is stronger, but, or why, why is it? I know the ways to appease the question, to force reality to yield to my need; I have read the words of the wise and listened to those of the fools — who by contrast, like chiaroscuro, struck by the light of truth, reveal themselves to be among the wisest — yet reason still does not appear before my heart.
sky:
monk: Don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear the reality revealed, but at least if you have to talk, please! I seek the occult. And what the eye still does not see! Not the answer, I want the way! I want to search. I claim my fatigue and the prize, the latter appearing as an idol with which to betray the creed of complete knowledge. But would he then be an idol? Would it be a wax statue, gliding in front of the warmth of the naked light of knowledge? Or perhaps, would it be but a fragment of light itself, a star that is allowed to decorate the constellations of the human journey? O Heaven, do not speak! Don’t show me the truth! I feel these were not the questions that disturbed your eternal judgment.
sky:
monk: Maybe this is my much feared perdition, isn’t it? Sometimes an intrinsic explanation doesn’t exist, sometimes it all boils down to what it is. Isn’t that awful? Isn’t that awful? What escapes the path of understanding does so because it is not part of it, it is unattainable because it is reachable. Evident, manifest, enormous white pillars of truth. There is no effort, there is no labyrinth that brings value to knowledge, makes it precious, and if it is not precious, what is it for? We shouldn’t use it to survive, for if it lacks quality, it lacks purpose, since it’s purpose gives it that inherent characteristic, forever intertwined and twisted between adjective and usage. So what is the ultimate goal? If we did not know ignorance, how could we rise from it? How could we appreciate living? There is no application of it that does not help us, but it is the contrast with the tiring crossing between hungry deserts and heavy swamps that allows us to reach it and give us that sweet relief that humanity now and always yearns for.
sky:
monk: And that You, O Most High, will never need to try.
Act II
scene: the temperature drops, the sky becomes darker and more violet. Thunder swells, but lightning is rare. Still, strangely, it doesn’t rain. The air is oppressive and thick with humidity. The sand rises with the wind, and slips into the habit of the monk, who still, still, observes the sky, standing on the shore.
monk: The wave surf still does not touch the line of the beach near me. (smiles wistfully) Like what I want to achieve. And now I wonder, if this constant question, in myself, which I cultivate as if it were the last shoot on earth, is it nothing but poison ivy, or thorny nettle. Maybe I should tear up this radical installation that I have placed in the center of my direction. Is that what I’m wrong, you say?
sky:
monk: Perhaps joy is what accompanies; which is carried by man within himself and pretends not to know it in order to feel something new, constantly searching for a nonexistent truth. So mine is a vain effort. At this moment, or vast sky, my intention is to study, constant, continuous incessant, like a strange machine whose mechanisms I do not know. How to stop it, I am the ouroboros, I bite and wrench my tail, stupidly, in front of my sick eyes. It is scary, it is immense. I don’t know how to contain all of this.
sky:
monk: It is, it is elusive. Retrace my usual steps. But I want. I want to know. I want to know everything. I abandon matter, but more greedy than ever I tear the soul of everything to feed on it. I request everything. I’m terrified of it. To contain the universe in me I have to become bigger, I have to become what I want to contain: I find myself dilated. How to welcome yourself into me? Must you be the Lord, or must I be? Don’t you belong to me right now? Am I the servant, entertaining you or are you listening to him without complaint? Do I own you when I look up, when I name you?
Yet here I am! Prisoner of this flesh, your prisoner, under the ether vault of your will.
I annihilate myself at the very thought of having been able to hope to possess the world. I would like to embrace the whole, to become One, without shame: only in this way could I finally understand the truth.
sky:
monk: After all, I don’t even know if these are my intentions. I treat this personal inclination as if it were fundamental, as if in your interminable eyes I were different and separated from this swirling sand, or from the wave that breaks swollen with breath on the rough sand, but I am not, I do not exist, I am nothing, nothing! They are nothing folds of the progress of time and history, a confused fragment in the frame of existence. without a reason, an end I tend to the infinite effort of knowing, why this indelible curse of observing, seeing, with eyes and mind and breaking down every slightest thrill of being?
sky:
Act III
scene: the monk, desperate, kneels on the sand and weeps.
monk: O! I had never stopped to listen to your voice! My every action appears in the back of my sight, and all that could ever make me proud, all that gave me strength and caressed me, like honey after a bitter sip of medicine is now tasteless, it has no vibration. My life is a shadow. It disappears in the presence of the revealing sun, and wanders gripped by the same lies as it. And I, on this beach, I stay. What am I, besides the body that holds me? The memories, the facts, the roads, all come together and nullify speaking with Your eternal existence. Or, if I’m not like you, do I really exist? Or are the past and the present but the same thing? Are these limbs a cradle or a prison? And if they remained empty, would I run free, or would I disappear like a curl of smoke in the wind?
sky:
Act IV
monk: Only now, while the world is preparing for rain, do I know freedom, because this must be it. I do not exist, I have no boundaries, I am therefore like You. I don’t have to fear my littleness, my presumed non-significance on this ground. What is the value of size? In this I can find that comfort that eludes me.
sky:
monk: Not answering me will only make me talk longer, which I don’t want to wish to You. But insignificance is so obvious, simple, nullifying. And now, at the thought of men, a smile opens up to me, a promise of the future, which is hidden under the beating of my soul. If we were non-existent, a simple hallucination of ourselves, how could I be now flooding you with futile and foolish questions, with light human anxieties? Why does creation exist if not to create something? And here! Are not those daily and listless actions, stratified over the centuries until they become automatic, that make us fundamental? it is our smallness that allows our coexistence with eternal things. We determine their, your eternity with our light and diligent system. Is that so, oh Heaven? Or am I building a reality with a welcoming shape all over to find the reason for not finding the end of my reason, there, at the bottom of the sea?
And perhaps, instead, it is useful to struggle for reality: here I am falling into silence and traps and finding the ash treasure of lies! A forced stop to find the way. You listened to my prayer, you marked my desire, showing me the way! You made me that pilgrim of divine truth I was asking to be! Or, but if I carry the mistake on my shoulders, ignoring the empyrean indifference that imbues the enormities, then I am melting before the imperturbable face of a distracted universe? And even if the question tortures me and burns me like a Greek fire, the answer of existing creeps in: existing is the answer.
Is that all I have to do? it’s so clear, so obvious. I can’t accept it. I deny it! I refuse it! I despise him! And even if I made this truth my own, I would continue to tirelessly pursue the immortal ephemeral desire for reason. Can’t I Learn? Don’t I want to change my faults? I am fossilized in the actions in which I find comfort, in labyrinths that I know by heart, solved and without secrets, in the illusion of a search — now archaeological — for passages that I may have forgotten.
monk: but that I have not forgotten.
monk: I would like to believe in revelations, but
but I am disgusted by it;
I would lose part of the revelation by denying the research.
sky: (thunders)
monk: I should go (the gaze gets lost in the distance, along the horizon, glides along a place behind the man’s shoulders, invisible from the viewer’s point of view) I don’t know anymore. Knowledge seems to me unknowable and alien.
sky:
monk: And, and all this was a useless speech, without goals; the goals reached seem despicable to me, to be canceled and forgotten along the quick passage of memories.
sky:
monk: I am emptied, turned inside out and beaten. The pillars on which I stand I see them so weak in the face of their opposites.
sky:
monk: This reflection has the flavor of a game of illusions. I feel the grip of decision tighten my mind. I don’t feel welcomed by this existence, by this time, but what few lucky men feel like that? Although perfectly homogeneous with what I live, tending first to the past, then to the future, the human spirit constantly yearns for something unattainable, uncomfortable and not happy with what it sees. So I will never free myself. This is my verdict. May the torment remain! You occupy my dust skeleton!
sky:
monk: (sighs) I inexorably go back to the starting point, You see it, my every act and strategy to escape is part of the plan stretched by reality to show itself. Will I ever escape it? (the monk stops, motionless in the tremor of terror).
monk: (shrill) is this then? In fact, I absolutely don’t want to know!
sky:
monk: (raising his eyes to the sky) Did this whole winding path have no goal? Was it just a desperate escape from the latter?
sky:
monk: Damn! One answer, one answer only!
Act V
sky: (thunders, terrible, frightening. Lightning strikes mercilessly like rivulets of pain on the sickening waves that mix with each other. Darkness. The storm descends)
monk: (astonished)
monk: What wonder, what grandeur! I almost feel a thrill of the future! it is an explosion of silence, it covers every moment that fades, like a thread the interminable buzz of the mind unwinds. O, the murmuring in the ears dissipates! The breath of breath. The rotating roar of the sky on the sharp edge of the lightning that thunders down the ether. There is this moment. Restlessness assails, and now I feel a sense of belonging to a place that does not exist, or that is perhaps subtle, scattered in the air, unattainable except in the complete cancellation of … myself. Or perhaps, perhaps in the inexorable expansion of the soul. How, how to achieve it? In front of this immense event I feel the event itself, it is me, ancient and powerful, and alone, so alone, as if I were all in one, surrounded by nothingness, so alone, completely absolute.
sky: (thunder and lightning)
monk: The lightning that appears before me, here I see it, matrix of the Universe, first energy, bearer of the light of realization, now. I know
that I exist. I’m here.
Reverberation of what was before and agent of after. This is the most I can ever be: existing. All that has been said is nothing but elusive sand trapped in the curl of the wave. Extended in history I stretch, leaving to my memory only details that are nothing but the intuition of what is happening in front of my eyes, and in vain I expect that by chasing them I will be able to find that sense of completeness that I am looking for, disappointed in knowledge. (bends down and picks up a handful of sand which slowly flies away)
This is my harvest: being is what delimits everything, nothing else exists but to exist. Under the power of wonder, like the remains of the monoliths of the past, we think we are cosmonauts in search of a lifeless nation, but we well know that landing we would find ourselves welcoming us and the Idea I was trying to grasp, thinks of itself. itself from the microcosm to the macrocosm, recognizing itself through the other opposite pole. Nothing exists beyond this. Every second of existence
it is a refraction of infinity and, while this storm flows, inexhaustible, and I am with it, it already changes, it is already born, it already withers but it does not disappear; a straight line that persists in the landslides of experience. And now I am already changing, I no longer believe yet, here, again fervently I would sacrifice myself for this revelation, which I now hate again as before !, desperate I am afraid of a thousand truths that are already lies in the face of the Only existent that I accept: to be. And while I collapse and reconstitute myself, I deteriorate and heal without rancor — or any shame -, under this enormity, this epiphany that I decide to grasp as infinite, continues, I succubus of it, subjugated to the bowels, I let my crooked thoughts until a new truth is unleashed on me
violent and shocking, like lightning across the seas.
Knowledge is a stem,
and now he bends, drowned, ready to rise up, in the rain of being.
(what is a teaching?)
monk on the shore — friederich
