Dust

Translated by Clarissa C. Burt

Dusties

Deserted are the roadways, and we’re blowing about alone. The earth has come to dust; and here we are, completing the life of dust.

We complete the life of the dust of the earth. This, whose life someone must complete, and here we are doing it.

We are not completing the earth’s life, but rather the life of its dust. We complete not a life, but a death. We came to accompany the dust on its last gust, bear it to its resting place, and sleep with it.

What the earth was does not resemble us. It is our antithesis, while we are its debris. We did not come to complete that earth, but to demolish it. We came not to complete but to demolish.

There is no religion before us, no religion after us, no religion for us. Dusties with no religion, not devout, for dust has nothing but to rise and float. Swimmers in a void. In space whose mother or child the earth is not. In the void of paternity, and the void of filiation. We are going unto our god, unto nonbeing.

We’re dusties, and this is what we saw in our blowing about. This was nothing before it came to dust; it was nothing before we came to be dust:



The Beauty of the One Passing On

The ones passing on quickly are beautiful. They don’t leave behind the weight of a shadow. Perhaps a little dust, which quickly disappears.

The most beautiful among us is the one relinquishing his presence, the one leaving behind a clean open space with the vacancy of his seat. Beauty in the air with the absence of his voice. Purity in the dirt with his uncultivated acreage. The most beautiful among us is the absent one -

The one cutting off space and time with an agility which does not let place captivate him nor time scatter him. Scattering himself in the swift gusts, not leaving straw for his threshing floor, nor wheat for a field other than his. The one pulling out of the prerequisite of walking to arrive. The one pulling out of arriving.

The one passing on quickly is like an emigrating angel. Leaving no residence which could be a place for a sin, committing no sin, committing no act of staying .

Quickly under a sun which touches him not, under rain which wets him not, atop dirt which leaves no trace on him, quickly with no trace and no heritage and no legacy.

He didn’t stay enough to learn a language. He didn’t stay to absorb customs. He has no language and no customs, no masters and no apprentices.

One passing on is beyond language, beyond customs, beyond ranks, names and emulation.

With no name, beyond public summons and convocation
above gestures, except the gesture of passing on.
With no sound because sound is a heaviness in the air.
Because the sound may bump into another
It may crush another sound in space; it may disturb breezes
And with no desire, because desire is an abiding, a persevering.

Those passing on quickly are beautiful; they don’t abide in a place so as to leave repulsiveness in it. They don’t stay time enough to leave a spot on the memory of those abiding there.

Those who abided for long with us left spots on the fabric of our memory that we don’t know how to wipe away.

Painful spots - wherever one was on the seats, we can no longer sit.

Those staying for long take away our seats, turning the furniture of our homes into pieces of themselves. So that when we sit, we sit on their ribs, on their bones.

Those staying crush abiders. As for those passing on, they don’t crush anyone, and no one crushes them. They do not tread on beings, nor do they tread heavily on the earth. Even the air doesn’t espy them but a moment.

With no anxiety, with no regret, no gods and no adherents. They have one faith: Passing on.

The ones abandoning places, and native lands and parents and sons. The ones breaking the bond. The ones ruining gallows made of the iron of place, time, and belonging.

Those who hold fast to staying fall gradually, one after the other. They gradually fall down on their native lands which have become delusion. On their sense of belonging, which has become a lie. On their parental feeling which has become a burden, on their faiths which kill us and kill them and kill life.

The ones passing on have no victims. Is it thus in order to glorify life, that we glorify its passage in haste, that we glorify suicide?

With the buoyancy of bird’s beating their wings, and the breeze opening up for them. With the buoyancy of the open air of passing on, and the scarring over of the air of release.

Ones passing on quickly, like the moment of snapping apart.

They have a sound from the sparrow, a glance from the branch, a quickly snatched whiff from the flower.

Their sparrows are for song and migration, not for imprisonment in cages, nor for being preserved forever stuffed in storefront windows. Their sparrows are the traveling spirit, not staying feathers.

And their flowers are the redolence escaping outside the vase.

Who would have discovered the beauty of passing on, besides migrants, those who don’t care, those dilly-dallying, the deranged, and the dead?

What moment uncovers life more than the moment of absenting oneself from it?

Is it because of that, must be a friendship with the departure more than a friendship with the habitat?

And, is it because of that, our life should be, only, an exercise upon the beauty of the departure?

The most beautiful of us are the ones departing. The most beautiful of us are the suicides. Who wanted nothing and whom nothing took in completely. Those who took one step in the river, enough to discover the waters.

The most beautiful of us are those who are not among us. Who left us lightly, humbly leaving their seats for people who may be coming now to this party.

A stupid party; and despite that, the ones clinging to staying leave no seat!

But what are the seats for, so long as the partiers start as guests and end as enemies?

So we can pass on lightly, then before the daggers devour us, before we become the main dish of the feast.

The moment of arrival at the celebration is the whole beauty of the celebration. After that, the beauty quickly becomes departure. The departing step is always the most beautiful.

The departing mingle with the fresh breeze. And when we stop to pay our last respects, we must also pay last respects to their memory along with them too. Because memory hampers their departure, it brings them back to their place, it makes them solid.

Memory hampers those who wish for death. It makes those desirous of life dead.
So let’s bury it, then.
Let’s bury memory as we sing
It’s a stupid party in any case, but in view of the fact that we’ve arrived, let’s sing and dance.
For a few seconds, in which we may be beautiful
But the most beautiful of us will remain: the absent one.

 

Exile of Language

If language is truly our home, we are living in exile.
Isn’t it what we speak with ourselves, not with others?
And there is no communion – not with our inner self nor with the other.
Language is a private matter, not a public matter. We speak in order to be convinced, and we are not convinced. So others be convinced by us, and they are not convinced.
Language is being afar, not becoming close.

Speakers exile themselves
Emerging from exile is emerging from language.

Language is the sounds of dead people.
Thus we pave the ground with corpses
Living speech was the speech of the first human. At first, before he spoke.

 

Shade that We Be

They’re shadows, they’re shadows. Don’t despair. Strike the tree and shadows fall. Cut the branches, you’ll see the sun.

But must one cut the tree off at its roots? Or does remembrance of light suffice?

Remembrance is almost our whole existence. Although we cut the branches and remain shadows.

And in this race, who reaches sunset first? The person or his shadow?

We race each other, we and our remembrance, then we crash into each other and disappear.

We become dead dust, and we settle down after that on the mire of the living.

Mire we didn’t will or make; not to be in it, nor to leave it to someone else, nor to see it.

They are shadows, shades.

Cut down the tree.



Desire

The one who has dropped desires has reached the goal. For there’s no desire to go further, nor to arrive.

Isn’t arriving relinquishing the desire to arrive? So you come to be with no desire for anything, just the small seat on which you sit, perhaps, or the tree before you, or the void with no seat and no tree?

Isn’t arriving to stay where you are? For your goal to be your exact place where you now are? To overcome desire - isn’t this the great passage?

Desires spoil outings. Those having desires no longer see the beauties of the road. Their eyes come to be elsewhere, in the locus of desire, which does not settle in a locus. Unlocatable desire. They come to be in the Absent, the stolen, the non-existent. They come to be in No-place.

The desirous abide in the annulled.

Is it possible to build a house on Absence? To put a chair in Nihility?

Desires make a hole in the spirit, they make wounds. May one put a seat in a wound?

If they are the wounds which desires dug across the extent of history, now flowing with blood from us, they have not yet reached their equilibrium, nor their goal. Is it then a desideratum, to make a new flow from our wounds, or to cicatrize the wounds?

Must one squash the body and soul in the passageways leading towards impossible desires, or sit and enjoy the scenery of the road?

Must one seek an absent one? Or be glad at his non-presence?

If he will not come, and we won’t reach him, do we live the absence of awaiting him, or do we live our presence in his absence?

There is a dance on the byway which racers do not see, a dance that the sedentary know. There is a dance hidden in sedentariness.

The still, alone, hear the songs. The noisy are the deaf of their own noisiness.

In stillness is a beautiful song. In silence is an astonishment of sounds. When you sit and are silent, you are inventing new chords.
And births that don’t screech when they are born.
And deaths that are not sorry, when they die.
And dances that are intoxicated by their stillness.
And distances that cross the byways while in their seats.
And flowerpots that waft scent from their emptiness.

In stillness there is a new earth. And heavens break dawn from closed eyes.
Occasionally the wound spreads its summer over the houses, and drops of blood come forth with their chairs to seek the shade of trees.
Occasionally drops go forth for outings and do not return to their veins. Occasionally the blood dries on the door, occasionally it is lost, and always it comes down on what is not its place, on dirt, on stone, on skin, on fabric, and never at its goal. For blood’s goal, most likely, is not to go out, but to stay in its place.

Emerging from place isn’t an outing; it isn’t attainment; it is loss.

Desires which take us out of our houses grant us neither shade nor an outing. Desires drive us to flight on the byways, and they leave bones of ours in unknown places.

Am I saying ‘Don’t desire’? How can that be? Isn’t that like saying ‘Don’t be’?
But is a universe by way of desire? Or is the universe born furtively in desire’s absence?

Does the universe abide in desire or does it begin from the point after it, from the empty space, and extend into a huge void?

To truly be - is it to work to fill oneself with being, or to empty it out of you?

And the goal – do you attain it if you work for it or if you annul it?

Haven’t you arrived when you annul goals?

If you reach a desire, it gives birth desires. For desire attained becomes manifold. It bears quarrelsome children, so you run, run and you don’t attain them until you breathe your last.

Sit down
Don’t gasp for breath on the byways,
Annul the way - you’ll arrive.



Knowing

Are we to feel assured when we know, or are we more anxious?
Is there hope in knowing, or despair?

Is it the way of salvation or the way of perdition?

But first, do we possess certainty or doubt? Fact or supposition? And whether it is thus or so, does it lead to salvation?

Indeed, what salvation?

Every time we increase in knowledge, we increase in doubt, for every bit of knowing is doubt.

And whoever knows more is more anxious, more despairing; he perishes more.

Every new bit of knowing is a new doubt, and a new despair. It’s even as if optimism is nothing but ignorance. It’s even as if ignorance is salvation!

Knowing isn’t the light [at the end] of the tunnel. No sooner do rays uncover one area of dark, but other dark areas, unknowns, appear. Those who enter the tunnel of their knowledge have nothing in front of them but darkness, with death in some area of dark.

The ignorant one does not enter tunnels nor does he need light. His ignorance exonerates him, and he dies at the entrance of the tunnel, in the light.

Is ignorance light? And is knowing darkness? Is it because of knowing that suicides commit suicide and killers kill and those who don’t dare to commit suicide or murder die in the silent corner of their loneliness?

Their loneliness in which they made a corner for speech and a corner for bidding speech farewell?


Every knowing is ignorance, every ignorance is certainty.
Every knowing is anxiety, every ignorance is a sense of assurance.

What annuls their differences and unifies them is perdition.

The knower perishes in the anxiety of his knowledge, while the ignorant perishes in the assurance of ignorance.
 

Splitting

It tramples on everything in its path, the caravan does. It squashes it silently, blindly.

The collective torrent sweeps things away. The collective caravan squashes underfoot. It pulverizes the individual and his narrow refuge for inattentiveness and sleep.

How can one save the inner blossom in this sweep? This orphan splendor – how can it be saved? One bobbing at the surface lives, the one drowning dies.

But is for a wave to be separated from its sea, and to dwell by itself on the shore? Is it for a drop of water to preserve the pearl of the depths?

The others are not just our hellfire. Others are our nonbeing.

Death is the other. Victims are the handiwork of collectivess. As for the thin of life, it is, only, possible in the deep dark of isolated spirits.

There was beauty, emanating from aimless flight.



Deviance

Deviants invented our values, they entrusted us with a beautiful secret civilization, in exchange for a civilization whose corpses are uncountable.

Deviants, those who died in asylums or prisons - they are our true parents.

The upright were swept away by the river. The non-upright remained on shore.

There exactly, on the sand and pebbles, are our seats, not in the river.

If a seat emerged from the water, it would quickly flow away.

We sit on our seats on the shore. As for the water, we stretch out our feet to it.

They were categorized as marginals, as the slander uttered by the torrent to the banks, as paper, rags, torn shreds falling from the dress. They were sorted to be outcast, to be shot, to be divested of the cloth of invitees, to be barred from the feast.

They were sorted for burning.

But, lo the world is being asphyxiated, so how can the world breathe without its margin?

Outcasts are the lungs of life.
The heart of life is the margin.

Are we exiting the heart of the world?

We are exiting, so long as it’s filled with blood
We live in the hand waving to the far away, in fly-about hair, in the unendingly-extending eye.

Then we’d be in the heart. The breezy snow-white heart swimming in air.

In the purity of the void.

In the heart of life is a root-vein for right and good and beauty, a root-vein split off and detached, whose name is defectiveness.
The defective go along in the root-vein lightly, silently, lest the root-vein split open and go bad. Lest it open onto other blood veins. So the narrow way will remain beautiful and secret.

Our sad silent spirits are beautiful in secret.
The ones going along the vein of defectiveness.
Our beautiful spirits are the defective ones.

We must now ruin this way, and break a new path. We must demolish the huge mass which has piled up with time and habit, and settled in our minds as one concept and one way for life.

We must invent an alternative age.

Don’t ages have to change? At least as snakeskins change?
A history in its entirety, which led to the obliteration of history!
Collective history obliterated the history of the individual. And individual history obliterated the history of life with the collective.

A single vision, a shared way, that cut off the legs of those deviating from it, which squashed the slow-goers, plucked out the eyes of the ones looking at another place.

The source was deceptive, and the outflow is victim of its deception.

A single source and a single outflow for a history in its entirety, whereby the source and outflow filled with refuse and corpses.

We must invent a new source and a new outflow.

Sleeping regions in the brain, leaving off like emptiness, bewitched like non-being, have a peace

Cells not yet awake have peace – indeed, they are the cells of peace!

History bears witness to the fact that every new cell which awakens, invents a new means of death.

This intellect practically wipes out the earth.

Its deviant cells have peace, madness has peace.
We must reinvent jungles
and build another age, whose mason’s level is placed by outcasts, and which the spirits of the insane guard.

 

Exile

Man is a reasoning being? Insufficient adjective. No longer precise.
Man is a being exiled.
It has become difficult to pinpoint a native place for people-
Exile has expanded. The whole earth has become a place of exile.
There no longer is a native land - this is a designation that came out of cultural legacy, out of transitory memory. The human race resides in exile, not in a native land.
In the past there was collective exile and individual exile. Today the whole has become comprehensive in its banishment. One exiled abroad, one exiled within, one exiled en masse, and one exiled in self-essence.

There remains no indication without, that this place or that is ours.
Nor is there indication within, that our self-essence is peculiar to us.

It has become difficult - impossible, rather - for a man to define himself, so how can he pinpoint his place?

When self-essence itself is exiled, how can one talk about place?

A torrent of footsteps on cold tile. A running out-pouring enveloping places. A moving along, not preserving any place.

There is no trail, just branching paths. Steps split up on all of the branching paths, so they get nowhere.

Feet no longer have a familiar road, or a corner spot on which to stretch out.

The way back to a familiar place, longingly, leisurely, joyfully, is no longer possible. It has become wiped out. It was wiped away by running steps and the death of familiarity, and the impossibility of return. The absence of place wiped it away.

Place which has absented itself like an open space, and absented itself like presence.

It isn’t yet possible to be present with others, not among them, nor in them. You no longer have words for them; they no longer have words for you. When you talk, you only talk with your essential self, even were you to think they were listening. When they talk, you hear only your voice, even were they to believe that you were listening. You are only in yourself, even if you were in a throng. And they are not with you, even if you were among them. You are nothing but an exile, and they are nothing but exiles.

An exile in place, and an exile in people. An exile without and an exile within. Exile’s triangle: Exile of Place, Exile of Other and Exile of Self-essence.

Is your self-essence a native land for you? Say: Is your self-essence a dwelling place? Is there a language between the two of you? Are you two mutually understanding? Intimate? Do you sleep on one bed? Do you keep each other company on the road?

I see nothing but enmity and treachery.

The essential self is not faithful to its owner; the essential self betrays; it does not accompany him, it leaves him behind; it does not save him, it brings about his downfall.

I see nothing but distance and absence.

I see no companions but the transitory. There are no companions but the dead.

Places have disappeared, as have their inhabitants. There is no longer a place, nor the ones dwelling in it. What we had learned of the two concepts of place and time has become error. And about staying in a place, and going to a foreign land. Everything has changed. Life and humankind and things have gone upside down on their connotations and themselves. They’ve entered into a chaotic mix, even unto annulment. Annulling place, annulling time, annulling the other, and annulling self-essence.

Everything has gone into total exile. Everything has gone into absence.

And this absence would be beautiful if it weren’t a collective wash-out, if it weren’t a concession to the mob. It would be beautiful, if the absent one had the privacy of his absence, and the one annulling his individuality had the option to annul.

For optional absence has victory over presence. Private exile has victory over belonging. Absence and exile have victory over the group, over being completely taken-in, and over being absorbed.

Thus exile is a rare victory; the exile wins his self-essence, even if he has no companions but the transitory, even if he has no companions but the dead.
Thus the individual has presence.
Thus the individual has no presence but in his absence.

 

Pain

If it is possible to define history, one can say that it’s the history of pain.

Individual pain and collective pain. The pain of being bound, and the pain of being divided. The pain of the self from the other, and its pain from itself. The pain of the people, and the pain of the earth. For the earth, just as creatures are pained by it, so it is pained by its creatures…. And on these mutually exchanged wounds is laid the edifice of history.

Since the first dawn there was pain. The earth rose on its scream. It came into existence, and grew on this sound. As if without it, it would not be. As if the earth were formed from a catastrophe, from a sin. As if what gives birth and what grows and what presupposes continuity is sin.

As if, were the earth to be joyful, it would dissipate!

There is no lifespan, but belongs to pain, and this may be what immortality means too.

The immortality of sin. That’s It is right also to say: the sin of immortality.

Does the history of pain need proofs? History has offered the proofs all by itself, along with philosophies and literatures and the arts and travel – all of them have done that worthily. Perhaps the history of pain needs something else: to demolish it. Perhaps to wipe our pain one must wipe out history! Or doing what one can: stopping this running in a disgusting way of going, sitting to watch the road, and laughing.

Was it possible with some kind of madness to overturn his way of going, and beginning a counter-history? Was it possible, in a moment of deviation, to change the pathway? In times gone by, hasn’t there passed a blessed time, an hour of great heedlessness?

In some moment from extended history, wasn’t the victory of the mad over the sane possible? The anarchists over the well-disciplined? The ones sitting on sidewalks over the ones occupying the roadways?

Wasn’t it possible for the earth to be a space of celebration? For places to be dance floors? Was it impossible, really, to put an end to pain?

Were that to happen, how would the earth be? Wouldn’t it be happy with its existence at that moment, and dance?

But some sin rules the earth and its creatures. A big sin, terrible so it can’t be resisted.

A sin which rules the earth and drags humankind into sins. It drags them into pushing and shoving and struggle, into committing the sin of craving ambition, into offense and pain.

For ambition is nothing but adding pain and offense together: pain for the self and offense for the other. Since its footsteps trample on the tranquility of the self, and it cuts its path over the other. Craving ambition disturbs the clarity of the psyche and troubles its waters. It mires the self essence, so it becomes neither water nor dirt. It becomes the pain of mire craving to be either dirt or water. The pain of mire bereft of its two modes of being.

Craving ambition is characteristic of the deficient. As for the replete, he calms down and sits. Every comer, every goer is pained.

What sticks is pain, and what sloughs off is pain.

The drop which drops on you descends out of its primary pain, and the drop which evaporates goes to its second pain.

On the spirit’s hide are blots of pains from people who stuck, from people who sloughed off, and from things, ideas, desires, defeats and victories.

But who dreams of defeating the other in the end - people or their pains?

Who dreams that he is going to his final resting place free of blots?

What finally makes it is not the clean body nor the pure spirit; what makes it is the indelible mark.

A big blot of pains and offenses, borne and set in a hole.

It would be truly beautiful if sin allowed one good deed: that you cast a last glance at your black blot and laugh.

 

Forgetting

Memory or life? Suffering or forgetting?
A question that links death with memory and happiness with forgetting….
But, isn’t this the answer of existence, dissolving the place of delusional thought as the given of existence?

I forget, therefore I am!
A new answer after a long history of annulling existence with thought and memory.
 

The Happiness of Forgetting:
Forgetting has a buoyancy of flight in the heart of happiness, which memory, sinking under its weighty burdens, will absolutely never have. The lightness of throwing off weight and wiping away blemishes to receive pure serenity.

The happiness of the moment, when it throws away what is before and what is after it. What hangs on to it, and brings it back to other than itself. Dividing it from its essential self. Making it a moment of an other, not a moment of essential self. Crossing it out.

The happiness of the moment which does not receive from [its] predecessor what would deface it, and does not emit what would deface the subsequent.

The Before is a weight on the now; and the After is a weight. Before and After. When they descend on the now, they kill it.

What was now is death, and what will come.
Life is Now.


Memory’s Tragedy:
Perhaps it brings no joy to recall and remind that envy, revenge, murder… are daughters of memory.

Except that memory is even more atrocious; it kills its owner too.
The recaller is the shade of his past, the shade of someone else, the slain victim of his essential self, the dead of his present.

When we remember, we become the dead.

Recallers are the dead of their dead.


Suffering the Memory of Happiness:
Don’t recall a deer that has disappeared in the thickets – that will only make you miss other deer which pass before you now.

Don’t chase after what has gone, that will make you have two sufferings: the suffering of absence and the suffering of pursuit.

Sit down in the woods with no weapons and no thought of prey.
At that time deer will come to you and eat from your hand.

And if they don’t come, you will at least have gained your well-being.


Memory of Desire:
Whoever desires, becomes victim of his desire. He who seeks to conjure a desire which has gone away becomes a victim twice: victim of desire and victim of memory of it.

Those with no desires are truly alive.
Nothing kills them and they leave no victims.

The world comes to belong to them, since they scorn it. For the world, which is not to be possessed, has a secret to take possession of it: rejecting it.

They fly high above, those with no desires. And from their wings fall the floating fragments of the world.


Memory of Place:
So are you here, while you remember there?
The place you came from has passed; the one you’re going to has not yet come. Place is only here.
But you are going along. And what is here becomes there.
A road with no place, then. Place, then, is forgetting places.
If you by chance forget place, are you still in an exile?


Memory of History:
We are not our essential self. We are the history stuffed into us.
The offspring of the forebears’ ideas, their instructions, their rules, their strictures, their prison cells.

History is our imprisoner and our executioner.
And if this executioner has a wedding party, we are the puppets in it. If this king plays chess, we are the pawns.

We are not us. We are them dressing up as us.
Whoever died hasn’t died. He is alive in us, and we are dead in him.
So you wanted to see history, look at your face. You will see its memory and its being and you will see your un-being.

Take it off, if you want to be.


Memory of Fathers and Sons:
Since their birth we begin to exile them from their essential selves. We hammer into them the nails of our memory, and stitch them with pictures of the dead.

Since their birth we begin to kill them.

We kill our sons just as our fathers killed us. We grant them the legacy of memory which annulled us, and will annul them. We open the gate of the kingdom to them, the door of the prison, and we grant them the shackles and the pawn.

We grant them the house in which the dead walk

Whoever loves his children will not leave them his picture as an inheritance, nor give them his essential self, not leave a memory for them.

Whoever loves his children will give them forgetting


Memory of Arrival:
The origin of sufferings is the idea of arrival, since there is no arrival, there is no point, no place to sit on the road.

Walking isn’t what tires one out, but the idea of the goal.

As soon as you are taken with it, the flowers on the way, the birdsong, and beauty of the reverberation of your footsteps pass you by.

The goal steals the outing from you, and grants you nothing else. Whenever you close in on it, it goes further off; whenever you look out for it, it absents itself.

Wipe clean the memory of arrival, and you’ll enjoy the walk.
Nay rather, forget! Forget the goal and forget the way
Forgetting has the bouyancy of eradicating the road, and perpetuating the moment of non-walking.

I think therefore I am?
No. I forget therefore I am.
Forgetting, this is existence.

 

Silence

Why did Nietzsche pass his last years silently secluded? Did he want to say that silence is the highest stage of speech? The most eloquent expression of the futility of conversing? To refute the ability of interconnexion between the essential self and the other? Between individual and collective? Was his silence despairing of language itself, of its connotations, its denotations, its contradictions, and its betrayals, of its source and its outflows altogether? Or the fact that silence is the sole permitted celebration of life, and the appropriate last honors for whoever wants to bid it farewell faithfully.

Why was Nietzsche silent all those years? And why did Rimbaud part with words? And the many other than the two of them – why did they put this dreadful boundary between language and its muteness? Between the essential self and the other, between life and its non-being, between staying and erasing existence, this little lone being between two non-beings?

And yet is it some kind a limit or an opposition between silence and speech? Isn’t speech generally dumb and silence generally loose-tongued? Isn’t shutting up a noisy inner language while saying something is noisy sounds too? So where are the boundaries?

And if there are no boundaries, if nothingness brings together the silent and the speaking, what does it mean that we choose silence or we choose speech? What’s the difference if we speak or are silent?

Except that silence lightens the heaviness

Whenever a sound decreases, I believe the earth feels repose. Those who are silent rise a little from the earth, their feet and bodies are no longer stuck to it. Those who are silent withdraw from the throng of the earth to celebrate their self essence. As if celebrating the essential self does not occur except in isolation. As if celebrating life is not but in silence.

Can’t one celebrate one’s essential self with others? It’s an individual celebration, with no partner, this in which the essential self stands in front of itself and sings. It’s alone with its splendor, its emptiness, and becomes intoxicated. The pure, secret, beginning, rare beautiful hymn emerges from its silence. The hymn which says nothing, which words do not double cross, untold, unheard.

The essential self celebrates its absence from the other. The essential self celebrates absence.

Is it the disappearance, then, which is rapturously sung? Is it the emptiness for which celebrations are held?

Is celebration a disappearance?

In the silence of trees and rock the earth sings rapturously; and in the uproar of humanity, it falls ill. In stillness it puts forth leaf and blossoms, and in noisiness it dies. What we learned isn’t true. The essence of life isn’t movement, but perhaps stillness. Thundering clattering water does not abide nor give life, but in point of fact sweeps away and kills. Water does not bring forth life unless it calms.

On the edge, on the boundary, it is possible for us to be. On the boundary between the essential self and the other, between the outside and inside, on the threshold. There our life may be on the slight thin boundary honed like a razor-edge.

Life, most likely, begins from the small point wiped away. The point which can hardly be seen between the demise of sound and the birth of silence. Between the end of speech and the beginning of stillness.

There outer procreation ends, and inner procreation begins. The birth of life which is especially ours begins. The world recomposed, impossible to be another place.

In the point erased our universe is born.

On the rim, where the moment of emanation and downfall are twins. Where birth and demise are one. Where existence and non-being are in a very fine point, on the head of a razor-edge.

But who has the strength to live there?

Who is able to live on a razor-edge? To save the moment of his birth from the moment of his death?

And the earth – is it for this reason heaped with corpses?

So let’s be silent a bit. Our sounds brought us here, to this Gehenna. To the slain fallen by words, by discourses, and by slogans. To the tortured in locked cells of speech. The ones hanged by the impossibility of sound arriving, the ones flung down in confused vacuums where there is no ceiling of silence, and no vast space of speech.

The silent ones are also suicides. True. But they become one with their essential selves on the suicide’s platform.

If only the noisy world would be silent, a bit. What would happen if the world were silent? If the din of humanity were to disappear for a moment? Wouldn’t the earth regain some of its youthful vigor? Some of its health?

These sounds spread disease.

When there is someone who really wants to save humanity, let him order it to be silent.

The earth is not looking but for one savior, who will save it from the din.

 

Suicides

The ones who break barriers, fears and taboos, the ones who open the dark of the tunnel with the lightning flash of their passing, the suicides, are our saints.

Those for whom life isn’t big enough, so they opened a space into death. They did not own a life, so they owned a death.

They deemed themselves above a gift, above hospitality which happened by chance, above a table whose dishes they were, and they closed the door behind them and departed.

They left seats and prattlings of promises, and went to their silence.

They dissolved the salt of spirit and pushed it to the rapids; They tossed the bread of salvation to the fishes; they shut up the brain’s vicious rustling, and were still.

There is some confused madness, they said, which brought us here, and confused madness will take us; so let’s take ourselves, let us be the confused madness.

On the edges of their passing, black butterflies could be seen; the confused madness of continuation could be seen.

They left for doers to inherit and be inherited, and went to emptiness, the emptiness standing above, beyond every legacy and possession

The frightful dark emptiness which their passing lit up and made it a friend.

Suicides have a corner, a seat to relax on in the void.
They have a house there, and trees, and land no one knows of.
They have a little roof terrace in non-being on which no one may sit but the dead. And a high jasmine plant before their door, the blossoms of which no one may smell unless they have become air.

Suicides have sheep and goats which have gone astray, so they go to shepherd them.

And there they celebrate their wedding with no bride or groom or sons. They celebrate the impossibility of mutual marriage, the eclipsing of progeny, the earth gone extinct.

And whenever one of them falls in the water, a wave is born.
Whenever one drops in space, a breeze blows up. Suicides invent new seas and winds

And from the rope, when they hang down, they fill the empty space between the ceiling and floor. They put something in non-being.

And the corpse, when the pallbearers carry it, they find what they thought was behind them walking in front of them. They find the dead corpse preceeding the living body, and the past walking after the future, and death getting in front of life. They find life in the corpse, and not in the body.

No one commits suicide but one who overflowed with life, one in whom life overflowed and spilled out.

No one commits suicide but one who has-one-over-on death, who lords over it. The suicide gives death meaning. And drives it away.

Whoever commits suicide leaves two blemishes, one on the face of life, and another on the face of death. He leaves traces of dominion.

Is there a dominion other than this?

But dominion is not the quest of suicides. Obliteration is their quest. The obliteration of the dominion of life, and the dominion of death. The dominion of whoever brought them, and the one who will take them away. The dominion of the Other, and the dominion of the essential self.
Obliteration, which is dominion over existence, is an act of freedom.
Suicides are our saints, the lords of obliteration, the lords of emptiness
And when they give up their spirits to emptiness, they are not giving up life, but condemnation. Nor a corpse, but the name of a killer. Nor salvation but nothingness.
When they give themselves up, they give up the void.