Delusional about the personal,
perception is apocryphal not foundational.
Weaving the liminal and temporal,
into a fallacy of the continual.
Doubt in deduction of the dual,
awareness is a single jewel.
-
cylinder.
His legs stretched out in the shade as he made more notes in his notebook, scribbles now filling up the margins, the only remaining space. Geometric constructions and complex algebraic equations created an impenetrably dense wall of knowledge, making his work visually off-putting to most. Today, as the midday sun bore down, a date palm delivered him shade, allowing him to work uninterrupted. A gentle breeze touched his cheek.
As he scratched an itch on his side, he noticed his ribs were more pronounced—the past weeks, as he honed in on solutions for his work, has had neglected food and comfort; his work all-encompassing. Notebooks—stacks and stacks of them, as well as loose leaves of crumbled and folded paper, scattered all around his house—contained the synthesis and syncretism of ideas and theories from far-flung thinkers, old and new. Diagrams and schematics of geometries that warped the mind, graphs plotting exotic equations, mathematical alchemy and esoterica; theoretical threads he hoped to pull into answers, solutions to reality itself; as if that needed to be solved.
He sat the notebook down softly beside him in the dry dirt, closed his eyes, and let out a sigh. The sigh evolved into a deep exhalation. Then an inhalation; the cycle repeating. And then again. He wasn’t sure exactly what drew him in, and back, to his childhood as an orphan at that monastery in the mountains. Remembering how the monks used to guide them in meditation, he crossed his legs and sat up straight. Decades receded in his mind—before his time as a renowned thinker, before his time as a young professor, before his time spent travelling to far-flung lands to study, before he left the monastery, before everything.
Slowly he opened his eyes, his gaze drawn upward. Mouth agape, he saw the sky as a monumental rotating column, stretching as wide and tall as was possible in every direction. Slowly it turned, a towering cylinder of shimmering indigo iridescence, though at this moment he wasn’t sure how much he could trust his own perceptions. The very essence of existence was being projected onto the inner surface—people, houses, trees, himself—all mirages. A salty tear ran down his cheek. Overcome with awe and abject astonishment, he witnessed the geometry of his notebooks in motion, the two-dimensional informational base of all that is. More tears flowed as realisation set in—this was it, all there was. The bedrock of being was not something solid and enduring, the tombs of kings, but rather ephemeral and ethereal, flickering and fleeting. All that he—that anyone—had lived and breathed and died for, decried as fundamental and final, was nothing but conjurings from the surface of the cylinder.
In the distance, plastered on the wall of the cylinder, he recognised a mountain formation from his youth; he hung his head. It was all an illusion—a hologram projected onto the consciousness. Hopes, dreams, fame, infamy; all phantasms of the great, cylindrical construction. He had nothing, was nothing. His face softened. He was free.
Combs of cirrus clouds appeared on the column, before being projecting into the sky, then dissipated just as quickly.
-
opinions.
The complaints and constraints of mates,
and bothers of others’ mothers,
are something over no thing.
Fusses and cusses about perceptual parses.
Ideation evolving from information,
we become militia mulling over minutia.
-
there.
The bright ruby sunrise made the horizon hard to identify, the red sky smudged with the red earth below. Several of the senior resident monks huddled together just outside the monastery’s entrance—a thick whitewashed gatehouse, framing heavy, ornately carved, impregnable wooden doors—before bowing in unison in gratitude and bidding him farewell. The heavy doors sealed shut behind them. He picked up the woven rattan basket at his feet, then adjusted the tumpline on his head. The contents of the basket were invaluable—manuscripts and scrolls, wisdom and teachings from a past long gone. Despite the early morning hours, the air already sizzled, the baked landscape preparing for another hot day. Enveloped and wrapped solely in a long length of white cotton cloth to ward off the elements, he pulled a hem down over his forehead, shielding his eyes from the scorching sun.
He took a first step, then another. The first of many. The road—more of an unpaved track—stretched is a straight line all the way to the sky, a rarely travelled line bisecting the undisturbed crimson. Almost immediately his waraji straw sandals became covered in sprinklings of ochre earth. Due to the sparse population in the area—a few camel herders and nomadic families—there would be no inns or caravanserai on his way; so the rattan basket also contained parcels of cooked rice and a gourd of water. Whether it was to be enough for the journey remained to be seen, but it would have to be.
Each day blended into the prior, as one breath into another—a concertina of chronology, the elasticity of experience, the illusions of the linear. The resident monks had informed him the journey to the next monastery would take five or six days; so he was in no hurry. Things would unfold as they will. Above he saw a formation of cranes, and smiled—he empathised with their hunger, having probably not eaten for weeks as they complete their annual migratory mission. He also noticed a new found nimbleness to his steps; buoyed by witnessing the resilience of the crane, he found a new reservoir of endurance to plumb.
His stomach growled—primarily in hunger, but also in anger—demanding more than the meagre rice rations he had been providing it once a day. Sitting in the discomfort, his well-attuned awareness acknowledged these grumblings and growlings were only temporary sensations, and would not be fatal; at least during this journey.
The next day—sometime before noon, based on where the Sun was hanging overhead—he saw a shimmering in the distance. The distinctive sparkling of the whitewashed walls of a monastery.
Knowing there were only a handful of humble monks cloistered at the isolated monastery—not the one thousand or so housed at the one he had journeyed from—and knowing they might be preoccupied, he sat. And waited. He meditated and absorbed the here and now. Though, in the now, ‘here’ ceases to have much meaning–there is no ‘there’ for it to contrast with; in the present, ‘there’ can only ever be ‘here’. A crane called far above.
-
equanimity.
Rebuke of now’s quintessence,
is blocking unmediated experience.
Yet, such is such,
and the rest a crutch.
Craving the fable of stable,
we revere and enable,
all we’re able.
Destined to detritus,
is the experience of all sentience.
Object-obliviating omnipresence,
the essence of presence.
Finding ease in the degrees
of the unknown frees.
Contentment in possibilities and probabilities,
peace of sight and sensibilities.
-
perception.
She flopped her hand into the water—the outrigger canoe was moving at a quick clip, urged on by the Trade Winds. She had made this passage many times before, and this explained her languid posture, slumped casually near the stern, the canoe barely wider than her hips. The wind pushed relentlessly on the sail; hand-hewn trunks arranged in a crab claw rig suspending a woven sail, as her ancestors had made since time immemorial. The outrigger counterweight, the ama—little more than a coconut tree trunk—raised up and took flight, further increasing the canoe’s velocity. It sliced over the small, smooth waves like a machete through a tuna. While one hand dragged in the water—the crisp Pacific combed by her fingers—the other loosely held a fibrous rope, which adjusted and trimmed the sails, maximising the little boat’s speed across the limitless tranquil turquoise that was spread out before her.
Clouds travelled above, running their own errands, and she used them—along with the ocean currents and bird life around her—to chart her course to her destination, a nearby atoll. At this pace, she would make landfall at dusk; just as many of the seabirds she was currently watching would begin returning to shore before the fall of darkness.
With the whooshing of water and the whistling of wind, she couldn’t help but be immediately present. Time dissolved; just her, a speck in the cerulean expanse. Her hand dissolved in the water; the separation between her and the watery depths seemed increasingly arbitrary. There was movement—a wave occasionally washed over the side, birds divebombed in the distance for lunch, a flying fish flew alongside—but nothing changed. How could it? All that has existed, and all that will exist, is as it is.
The horizon became inverted. Actually, or allegorically? Or perhaps it doesn’t matter? Sea overhead, the sky submerged; whales soared, birds swam. Blue stacked on blue. And yet, nothing had changed; except perhaps perception. To perceive—to attempt to understand—is to experience the illusion of change, the myth of separation and distinction. Ocean oscillating, cosmos churning; movement, and yet changeless. Awareness, the now—outside of thought, circumventing the thinking mind—oblivious to time, the measure of change. All that is, just has it has always been, still just is as it is.
-
ritual.
Obfuscate obliteration,
ideas pulled into oblivion.
Dissolution of information,
on the exhalation.
Hubristic construction,
an arrogant comprehension.
Temporal disintegration,
annihilation in meditation.
Inversion of expectation
in the subversion of separation.
A return to origination.
through ritual connection.
-
wisps.
Clouds of wisteria and jasmine clung to the small cottage, like a mountain peak cloaked in fog. Along horizontal parallel beams the climbers crawled—the low pitch of the roof also luring them higher—bringing with them the scent of Spring and bees eager to harvest the fresh pollen on offer. Delicately, she placed the incense holder on the table; there was a barely audible dink as the clay base reached the table top. It was of simple design; a clay circle, with a small opening in the centre, to which the incense stick would be stuffed. Using her left hand, she ran her fingertips up the vertical incense stick until she reached its length. The miniscule bumps and contours confirmed its handmade, hand-rolled provenience. Her right hand held an open flame—a piece of paper alight—and she gently brought this to the end of the incense. A huuft signaled the fire had done its job, and soon wafts of sandalwood wound their way towards the ceiling, drifting and dancing on the breeze allowed by the many open windows of the house.
Her sight might have corroded, but her sense of smell had not. She picked up scents of the sandalwood, along with botanicals the artisan had included in its creation; notably mixed with the bouquet of the resident climbers outside. She strained her memory, trying to recall it as she had seen as a child; surely these soft scents were riding the waves of wisps emanating from the incense stick—or at least as she recalled it.
How many—she would never know for certain—of her memories had become mis-remembers, reliable lies, unable to be validated by vision of the now? The memory of the scent would endure longer than the event, though forever through the warped lens of memory. Surely this was true of all of us, she thought; removed from time and place, we still yet claim knowledge based on poorly transcribed notes jotted on worn parchment of the mind.
She sat on a cushion next to a large window. Tilting her head to experience the breeze on her cheeks, a subtle symbol of the Spring blooming beyond the borders of the room. All she knew was right now—not reliant on faded falsities—was she could smell the wonderful aroma of sandalwood, sublimating with the scent of wisteria from outside the ajar window. With a ffift, the incense stick burned out, extinguished.
-
river.
Helix of awareness,
conduit of consciousness.
From the original,
via fontanelle.
Astral source to mental river,
sentience a fractal mirror.
False belief in two,
deduction askew.
Illusion of separation,
errors in perception.
-
chai.
The near-full Moon lay down lunar light all over the arid landscape. It gave everything a milky tone, sharply contrasting with the midnight blue shadows, which ran from the Moon’s gaze. Low shrubs and rolling rocky meadows dominated the plateau here, all bound tight under the Milky Way above—a convex strip seemingly securing the serene night sky. With the scene barely varying in its tone of sparse monotony, he decided to press on until dawn encroached on the horizon.
With the slender fingers of a new day beginning to filigree the morning sky, he acknowledged it was time to pause and set up camp. The hobbled camels made a fuss, as they always do. It was understandable, he empathised with their collective animosity. Several bellowed in contempt, then others signalled their approval of this disapproval with long low lamentations.
As the Moon sunk lower, he began to gather nearby scrub to start a fire. Once the orange flickers had warmed his fingers, he set a brass teapot right into the flames. Covered in dents and scratches—a knowing, a world-weary patina—he had carried it with him for at least a decade now. A small handful of leaves were retrieved from a tin tucked away in a pair of saddlebags slung across an unhappy camel. Boiling water ricocheted inside teapot, the steam announcing that tea was soon to follow. Easily he held the teacup in his hand, holding it up level with the horizon, and directed the spout towards the vessel’s waiting lip. Deliberately he sipped, savouring the smokey essence; a flavour that seemed to transcend time, as if tinged with the experiences of centuries past.
Using the sleeve of his flannel shirt, he wiped the last vestiges of tea from his beard. Kicking away a few of the larger rocks, he laid down a small, intricate yet well-loved rug—the oasis towns in the area were famed for their textiles and carpets—on a flat area of red earth. His tired legs effortlessly lowered him, and then crossed themselves in front of him. As if almost to steady himself—physically, yes; but more importantly, metaphysically—he anchored his palms squarely over his knees. He paused; then emptied his lungs of their last remnants of oxygen. Again he paused, before closing his eyes, and ever so slowly inhaling. As he gently opened his eyes, his vision was filled with the innumerable stars above, though bit-by-bit they were being consumed by dawn’s light. Like a silhouette burned into the eyes from too bright a light, the Milky Way was seared across the sky; though ghostly, two-dimensional. His thinking gradually faded—the cogs of thought, the constant clockwork of analysis, grinding to a halt under the immense presence of the cobalt half-dome overhead. A laminar flow of awareness spiralled upward—inward—into space, into nothingness.
