By William Markiewicz
Reflections, like "Howling," "Extracts," are works in progress; certain repetitions may occur. Please, let me know if you notice any -- thanks. Also, don't take the darkness too seriously; it may be humour in reverse. WM.
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Me -- old and young, rich and poor, wise and fool, loner and social, universal and detached, free and prisoner... Struck blind and deaf, emigrating from myself, I took the pathway to intuition.
I paint, I write, and simultaneously the mystery reveals itself through my invisible partner; there are two of us, as I discovered in my old dream. Apparently, one takes on himself the chains of reality, the second one acts in the domain of the unknown (intuition). Remember that what you create is, in the first place, a gift from yourself to yourself. Meaningless things become loaded with historical meaning if you engage them. Probably your past is a part of your inspiration. Your past goes away from you. You from your past – never. Intuition is organic. My mind draws the essence from society. My body lives in time; my mind in time and space. Wasted life? Happy life? Not a matter for statistics; only the immediate counts. Doom is fast; only insomniac nights are slow. I have no control over the existence of life nor over the outcome of life. The stone exists through its mass, its weight, its aspect, but it is not alive. Life manifests itself through its activity. Certain practices of Yoga, Zen, try to combine the qualities of mind, body, and stone.
In a minor key: The weight of naked existence – a spade with nothing to shovel. Remember that pain has no antidote for itself. My surrealism: Sometimes I know something but I don’t know what. Victory – my duty, defeat – my Karma. I learned from life: fuck in or fuck off. I am a slave of a cruel master – life – for which I have to fight because I have no other alternative. Life is dependent on another master – Karma – to which the fate of life and my own fate are indifferent. There is no other choice. One has to forget on whom you depend and to fight as if you were personally fighting Life and Karma. There is no importance of dimension, only of purpose. A tiny step reaching its goal is "greater" than an infinite great step reaching nowhere. Infinity leads toward freedom, meaning freedom is nowhere. “Transcendence” is nothing without paroxysm. Freedom is in steps rather than in the goal. Gurdjieff said that one should never give something for nothing. He was right because giving for nothing, I feel not like a donator benefactor but like beggar craving attention.
The difference between committing and not committing is that if you commit, you make a choice with its consequences, while, when you don't commit yourself all the philosophies remain open. Remember that if you resolve a problem, you've resolved a problem, not life -- you LIVE life. Life is an act of the moment and the moments form themselves into a chain, and the chain is a continuation not a solution.
For certain people, living is to take small steps for self defence against things in life that little by little try to kill you. Wisdom is to be able to look at the world from a distance where the gold and garbage shine equally. Next question is how 'to swim' in it? To imitate youth means to pretend joy of life.
Can you escape inwards from mediocrity? The old man in the cave facing existence - non-existence may have the answer as well as the "poet maudit", Van Gogh, Soutter, Darbin (collages of little girls) ...
No facelift for the past. Cut the umbilical cord from yourself, from your past, and keep some layers alive as plants do. At the cerebral, emotional level, too close contact smashes contact. You need a certain distance to exchange sentiments. Physical contact requires closeness. Philosophy and spirituality are two sisters but beware of closeness in spirituality. Through close spiritual contact, you try to mold the spirit and it becomes a mind game. Physical contact and philosophy require closeness. Philosophy without a physical basis becomes a stone.
Me/You -- Duality of "me": When you treat your life not as a sum of parcels but as one bloc -- when parcels of life become a bunch of gestures without significant values but gestures that still must be made -- when the meaning is less clear because it is a global bundle of regrets and confusions (desires), then concentration adds up to something confusing called me/you. This me/you, with a chest loaded with the heavy ballast of past and present, still paradoxically remains gaseous (because not filled with concrete aims). Concentration on ourselves must be volatile, an expectation of something we cannot name. A new dimension grows up, a dimension of "glass menagerie" in which the transparency is more important than what it represents, a dimension that is a harbour of the unachieved, a harbour of desire, summed up in a spidernet forming the shape of our life. We focus attention on the focus rather than on the content, on rebellion rather than on what provokes it.
For consciousness there is no homogeneity; we have to count points of strength and weakness. The mudhole is tiny and the void is on the offensive. When I’m a tourist in search of a common denominator for my thoughts, and my aspirations stop driving me, then I have to direct my aspirations, even in the mudhole. How to fight hell? Sometimes we can defy reality. What did a Russian cartoon show me? That one can dance in a wolf's belly. On limited territory we can manipulate our will and so repeat eternally small steps for a lifetime.
The lion bites the bars of the cage. Each act of life is a pattern registered in the genes. We -- prisoners of joy, prisoners of genes. We -- prisoners of life.
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William Markiewicz