mafia

It is dusk - almost dark. Three large men dressed casually dressy sit in front of me at a table outside the coffeehouse. They are not nice men. With a nasty feeling down in my stomach, I realize they are speaking Lebanese, with the sporadic English word: "desperate," "half-breed," and once, loudly "...the fuck?"

One of the men, with a shaved head and four gold rings, pulls off both black loafers he is wearing, then peels off both socks, puts his feet up on the table.

A beautiful, dark woman walks by, and another of the men says "Sharmouta." I want to kick him in the teeth.

things only the moon sees

I took a walk around the city last night at 4am, with a cigarette in one hand and cup of strong tea in the other. It was so, so peaceful, everyone sleeping except a mass chorus of birds. It had rained all day; everything was slick and misty.

Something in my brain says that if happiness is to be real, if it is to last, it must grow gradually, not explode onto the scene. I don't know how to believe sudden rays of light. If it feels so good, so sudden, it must be imagination, right?

I like to look at clouds of my cigarette smoke against the glare of streetlights.

I find I am scared of nothing, nothing at all, except not creating to my full potential... and being alone in life.

"His thoughts depressed him."

"It was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping! Either one lived and let one's senses play, drank full at the primitive mother's breast-- which brought great bliss but was no protection against death; then one lived like a mushroom in the forest, colorful today and rotten tomorrow. Or else one put up a defense, imprisoned oneself for work and tried to build a monument to the fleeting passage of life-- then one renounced life, was nothing but a tool; one enlisted in the service of that which endured, but one dried up in the process and lost one's freedom, scope, lust for life...

"Ach, life made sense only if one achieved both, only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! To create, without sacrificing one's senses for it. To live, without renouncing the nobility of creating. Was that impossible?

"Perhaps there were people for whom this was possible. Perhaps there were husbands and heads of families who did not lose their sensuality by being faithful. Perhaps there were people who, though settled, did not have hearts dried up by lack of freedom and lack of risk. Perhaps. He had never met one.

"All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a a wanderer or a sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person-- no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for the one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other. Perhaps women had it easier in this respect. Nature had created them in such a way that desire bore its fruit automatically, that the bliss of love became a child. For a man, eternal longing replaced this simple fertility. Was the god who had created everything in this manner an evil god, was he hostile, did he laugh ironically at his own creation? No, he could not be evil; he had created the hart and the roebuck, fish and birds, forests, flowers, the seasons. But the split ran through his entire creation. Perhaps it had not turned out right or was incomplete-- or did God intend this lack, this longing in human life for a special purpose? Was this perhaps the seed of the enemy, of original sin? But why should this longing and this lack be sinful? Did not all that was beautiful and holy, all that man created and gave back to God as a sacrifice of thanks spring from this very lack, from this longing?"

--from Narcissus and Goldmund, Hermann Hesse

my left eye has a twitch

This twitch seems to sum up my existence right now.

I am attempting to see all the world through two ridiculously small black holes in my face. They are sometimes smaller, now larger, but always too small to pull everything in. They should be larger, widening, dilating until their enormity generates a gravitational pull, allowing nothing to escape the attraction.

Oh that my eyes were truly Black Holes. They'd vacuum in oceans and suns and x-rays and libraries, and all the intangible things too, and cyclone-like, maybe the occasional cow. And people. Especially people.

Maybe if this were the case though, and my eyes suddenly became all-seeing, that would make me a god. That is something I never wish for... The power / responsibility symbiosis still scares me, a bit.

Something striking me as I read Narcissus and Goldmund is that (albeit I am only 7 chapters in) I feel as if I am Goldmund, noncommittally, and without judgment; but the thought is there, nonetheless. I find myself associating him with the High Priestess and the Empress from the Tarot, whereas Narcissus is The High Priest and the Emperor. And I don't know that I've read of a relationship so passionate and heartbreaking since C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces.

But my eye is twitching again, and whether from lack of sleep or caffeine, or a simple rejection of what it is seeing, it is disallowing me to take everything in uninhibited.