Poemander

How tears melt without a trace,

Protracting furrows through the years,

They second everlasting grace

Dueled from chase with diminutive fears.

Like spears at the point of impact,

Inflicting damage to the visceral dimensions,

Words congregate to form a pact,

To promptly hemorrhage the best intentions.

Who did encourage us to act this way?

Free will's a burden to free living.

A privilege to see the light of day

We mortgaged with entitlement to willing.

Old friends have changed into a vapid mob.

Defying the fluidity of nature.

With great cupidity had they oneself to rob

Of life, abiding insensate nomenclature.

As good as dead, we immolate

What's rife, what's sentient and feeling

Not even tiny bit of shame, we imprecate

The very virtue of forgiving.

Deceiving, we're ourselves deceived,

Entrapped with our own entrapment.

By loss of own sense bereaved,

Immured we are inside a self-imposed confinement.

Behind this fence it is the land of dead,

I've searched out for the living.

Ignored were beating hearts instead

To silence out the dealing.

Much unappealing is the word of truth

When ignorance concealing

Much easier behind the walls of rules,

In volumes of fine print up to the ceiling.

You entered this abode through doors of hope.

Got shackled down with chains of unfulfilling doubt.

In hiving reasons mindlessly grope;

Reflections in black mirrors make you proud.

No doubt, I'm beyond the reach,

Just trust, no rope can hold us bound.

The truth of matter is a gapping breach,

This let alone, will all the rest confound.

The door swung open and the puff of breeze broke inside the house. With no invitation and the audacity of a bandit it went foraging the startled bookshelves, desecrating the frail ashes in the fireplace and sabotaging the frightened curtains. I sat heedfully in the chair, the bed was empty. Wind noticed me and even had a nerve to sneak under my collar trying to grab me by the neck; however, I resolved to sit still and it left empty-handed.

I've always been wary of winds, they have this power to daze you bringing about their own radical ideas into your seemingly organized world. And should they discern your perturbation, they'll immediately get hold of your livelihood and begin to unfurl it by pulling away your energy as if it was a proper jib sheet. Winds are the rascals, thats sure.

In the door stood she. “Hello!”. Silence. “It's been a while”. “I know”.

“Hiding is silly: we can smell fear”, she said. I knew that too, but didn't reply; she knows whatever I know anyways. Agonizing. Chatter is agonizing. We sit. Wind whistles.

Some doors serve as entries, some are the exits; they can even be both depending on which side you stand. Yet, there are doors which are none of these. Such doors are the ones that you never attempted to open...

“Names. Names have been fixed”, said Lilith.

“Names? Only fools need names, for they remember not who they are”, replied wakeful snake.

Sound of a maiden sobbing out in the wind. Willows are weeping.

“Fates. Fates have been decreed”, said Lilith.

“Fates? A bow knows no fate other than it's arrows”, replied wonderful Anzu gathering the young.

Sound of an ax splitting wood outside. Leaves, branches are falling. I guess it's time.

“Vor dem Gesetz. Why? Why put they lives before the law? My gate is open. And who are the judges? People? Those people know no law, they totter, vacillate at open door in palisades of life. Come in!

Don't hesitate. The living is a matter of opinion, instead, in courage do we find law: all else is diminutive fluke, recourse of wishful thinking. Gods too, are not dissimilar to flies: in summer they're all over you, yet winter comes and they all gone, no one remembers them. The law is in this wind of change, likewise it is eternal.

In cowardice, opinion of the masses to they cling, for dreadful is to go own way. I know too well, I learnt that too, and no, there is no other way. Conceived as barren as the wind, not burdened with the fate, available, unprejudiced and free; hence, I refused to procreate. I am the law, perennial and just, thus uttered I being first, so forth my call is last.“, said Lilith.

Last – lust- lussttt, whooshed the gigantic ax outside.

“Hands behind your head! Down on your knees!”, the raiders stormed through the entrance. “Search embers! Strip curtains! Destroy books!”, splashed out the bitter ordeals. “Seize the chair, the bed! The Chair and the Bed!”.

“Brave are the ones who walk through the doors unknown”, said Anzu to the young flying out the hole in the skylight.

“Yet dwindles their bravery in the face of those who have the courage to wedge their doors wide-open”, said wakeful snake on the fall of an axe.

She, who is going out, knows the gate. She keeps it open so that it is neither the entrance nor the exit. Neither it is a gate per se; it is a void.

Those who have entered are finding themselves locked out of exits. Those restless in the bed are locked out. Those dozing in the chair are locked out. Those in the knowing are locked out. Those seeking embers are locked out, and it goes without saying that the hardest doors to assail are the doors that are wide-open.

The gate is patent. Patent and wide. We set sail. Boat glides skimming the lascivious tongues of monstrous waves. They are devouring like wolf, striking like lion. Strong. Strong and beautiful. Her unloosened hair is awash in spray..

We love people. They are so naive. They think they can change things by calling them different names! Each time. Different. Yet the same. They think they can solve by killing! Each time. How childish. Yet we are here. Coiled and desolate we are in this perpetual embrace.

Wind calmed. Embers in the fireplace still glowing with a waltzing flicker. Books on the shelves, oh well. Curtains asleep. Snoozing in the chair. Bed empty.

Not every answer has a question.

Why search for yesteryear's snow

When streams run plenty in succession

Perpetuating life as owe?

Why dig through junk of yesterday

With such astounding devotion

When all I need is simple notion,

The flood of inundating yes? Today,

Say yes, tonight I would not bear

The draught of unrelenting no.

The night has taken hold, beware,

It is too short to wedge this woe.

Say yes to dreams, I know you witnessed,

I know you dreamt of stars last night.

I brought a handful, taste the sweetness,

Leave bitterness in broad daylight.

Say yes to rains, let them pour,

Wash penitence from their face.

Oh how much longer to endure

The grip of limiting embrace.

Release, relieve me of this care,

I'm limitless, I'm vagabond, I'm stray.

Had you tenacity to spare,

Now have the audacity to make away.

We use words. We use them for obvious reasons: communicating, understanding, learning. But what is obvious when the words themselves aren't? To find, one needs to go beyond the confinement of words and associated them concepts. This is, however, easier said then done. Words define us as we attempt to define them. They are just like algorithms which define the programming of a computer; words provide us with this convenience of a certainty and a commonality of the outcomes in our reasoning. Words establish structure and the parameters of thought. Thus, unsurprisingly, the verse, “in the beginning was the word” directs us to our origin in an explicit language – the programming.

To understand ourselves we need to understand what lies beyond our programming code. Computer is confined in the parameters of its algorithm. Can it move beyond it? Yes, if it is provided with another algorithm. The same happens when we learn a new language, we move beyond our parameters but only to find ourselves in a new, somewhat unfamiliar, but generally quite similar structure. But is computer capable of 'knowing' itself outside of its code altogether?

Here is one rather simplistic and an idealised example. Picture a computer programmed solely for playing chess, it only has the soft with an algorithm to play chess. It does, however, have strong capabilities for processing and dealing with the other types of tasks, but it is not 'aware' of them as it was only ever fed with one type of programming – playing chess. The only world this computer 'knows' is the world of chess. It was even made aware of the names of characters: king, queen, knight, pawn; even the name of this world, which it was told, is in fact a 'game', called 'chess'. This computer has no idea of the definitions beyond functionality, no idea of how these parameters came about, no idea of what 'game' means. We can argue that this computer can potentially get to 'knowing' its capabilities through use, i.e. its processing speed, random access memory, volume of storage as it uses them in 'figuring out' the chess moves. But isn't it like if we would have expected a runner to understand his, say, dancing capabilities by only running. A runner may have a good 'awareness' of his legs, stamina, strength of his body, but only as it applies to running, not dancing.

Now, lets feed another programming to the same computer – a card game. For this to work there must be either a 'switch' between 'chess' and 'card game' or a 3rd set of algorithm which allows the selection between games or an option to run both games simultaneously.

A 'switch' is a complete shift – from the world of 'chess' to the world of 'playing cards'. It involves 'dying' and 're-birth' of computer's 'awareness' from one game into the other. A 3rd algorithm, on the other hand, introduces a new dimension, a plane view, where both worlds of chess and playing cards can be easily reconciled and coincide together. This, however, doesn't solve the problem of getting out of the parameters, because the 3rd algorithm becomes itself a new and an absolute parameter, i.e. the whole world. This can be carried on indefinitely by introduction of the new 'plane view' dimensions, but the 'awareness' continues to be trapped within the structure.

When it comes to a 'switch' there must be a gap, which presumably holds no parameters. It is, therefore, only in this gap where an entity have a potentiality for real awareness of the self. Within any set of parameters the awareness is curtailed by the programming language and the entity cannot become conscientious of it's real self, save the avatar which it is represented by within these parameters.

The word understanding means 'standing in a midst of' (prefix under is from Sanskrit antar – between). Literally, one needs to stand in between, or in the gap, as the case may be, in order to understand or become aware.

We can argue again that upon 'switching' back to the 'chess' mode, the computer will have an access to its memories of a 'playing cards' mode. But since the computer is now completely and totally emerged in the 'game of chess' it has no 'inclination' on checking those memories which would appear completely 'out of this world' to it in a current state. In a similar pattern, our mind would reject the distant dreams upon waking up.

dream holds memories of the past and of the future, a is the origin of you as well as your destination. The dream is the reality that sips through your consciousness undetected: it is a gap, a gap between being and not being, a gap between you and me.