Thursday 24 December 2015

Being-Empty. Being-Alone




Ask for nothing from life, save life alone.
That's the bare minimum, surely.
It may be the ground on which all other desires can flower.
Being itself must come first.

What is this being-in-itself? Being-alone?
Being erased of content?
Is it more than a vanishing point in the distance?
Can we hold it, let alone grasp it?
If the mind rubs out its own baggage,
Won’t desire remain in an otherwise desert Zenscape?

That desire to expunge the self, Zen-like.
Or the Cartesian desire to keep to the Cogito alone.
The desire to cut out the meat of the empirical self.
Only a mind already throttled by Reason and Education
Would want to rid itself of Reason and Education.
Rid itself of its graduate’s robes.

It's only the Intellect itself – the proud Intellect – which puts on a hair shirt
And whips itself into nothingness.
But when the endpoint of no-return is reached
How does the mystical/Cartesian self-annihilator
Stop himself from following the markers back to ego and contingency?
Won’t its treasures and temptations forever call him back?


If thought is truly dead, or if all presuppositions are thrown out,
How does the mystic/philosopher know he's in the Otherworld
Away from the world of logic, sex and dog shit?
Wouldn’t he need an experimental water chamber
In which he can float, without eyes, ears and all the rest
Blocked from all things sensory?
A mystic in a water chamber, like Plato in his cave,
May say no to sensory distractions and temptations.
But wouldn’t the flood of memory drown him still?

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