In the Baltic green I inhale deep, I bury my fingers into moss-smothered stone and I nod to the silent sphinx who sits there guarding the bones. The riddles have long fallen into slumber; in this myth-starved cavern I spin—catch me should I stumble, through the cobwebs in the wall—now stop for a single moment to watch the three engage in arachnida warfare; one beast eats the other, and twenty four eyes bear witness—

And there in the waters a primordial sound hums—I, myself; you, myself—all is in flux, and the sun is new each day.

What was scattered

gathers;

What was gathered

blows away.

II

Red is the light in the eye—spinning halos around the swing-dancing shadows between winks of crimson. Two figures lounge in the cluster of flames—a heat that laps, rhythmic, mellow, closer to water than to fire. Even now I see the rail tracks unravelling into the eastern steppes, the mountains over borderlands, the black nights overspilling with whispers—where tongues coalesce and sunder, where truth is traded for question, where stone-cliffs utter their own confessions—to live is to run is to die: and so to rise.

III

And the mouth of the river gapes, sulps as the baptism closes slow, over the skin, over the sigh that silently it robs from my tongue—heed the black waters: eclipsed is the autumn, premature is the winter; under the swollen night I sink, slow, into the well, to touch its pulsing heart, and to drink deep. A breath, a sip, a sigh—of night. Scatter the wish to the waters; tonight we sink to the knees before an altar of wind—crouched thus, like the shadows around the round table, for only a moment you must wait, until the wind returns your silent praise with a fevered delight of its own—one moment trips to the next, spun into a silver web of the skies—the dance of Dionysus, the hum of a song primordial, ever silent, ever seeking, fevered skins for which to twine this crimson thread.

Too crude to be known, a song spun from the borders of bone, of bruises, of stones.

Only the blues, she can sing, as if she may

Grasp some guise of another’s past, don a mask, she is granted only the dreaded grey, a sheen of gravel— dust and sediment of a being, unravelled.

Did you ever see a human form that casts no shadow?—A human is nothing without its shadow,

The lone soul, unknown beyond the contours of its song, to be shown.

Hers is a shadow of wood curved and strung in nostalgia and steel, buzzing bare harmonies, mind melted to feel

That which she had only then begun to weave

Unknowing how and when her threads had transfigured from ink into steel.

True as the twilight moon sliced in two, twinned tragedies take the place of I, and you.

Yes, she is singing the blues, fingers flecking the floorboards in tones and tunes of a fearful desire to be dreamed of, to be moved,—

All she knows is to flee and fall mute, fold into her shadow, sing silently blue

As though her sole witness were not the stale silver of a waning moon,

She does not know, the fear is not her own,

Longing for the gravity of truth leaks from a loom,

And the tapestry spins the dull light of lyric to a red-imbued room.

You watch the shadow her song casts on the wood below, curling like the strings of the swallows,

See shafts of a stolen sorrow slide from the lungs to the finger tips and the corners of lips, seep down to the hollow

That gapes a wound into the instrument, a moonlit lament: her shadow, her soul

Like feathers or fronds into spring’s flying song, slowly swells, and then folds.

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Blinding is a notebook of mine, the writer confesses. In a lonely little room, he had scribbled, shorn of the distraction of television or radio that might pull the restless mind to melt momentarily to some mindless murmur of another land, another time. He had been pulled instead to the page, the pen, to consecrate in ink the spirals and bends of his own mind: Blinding is a notebook of mine. His voice as he speaks scrapes and slides, like shells and rocks rasping beneath the bare foot which treads the riverbed.

A kind of salvation sought him in words. No plan pulled the patterns of his pen, no synopsis, no preordained geometry; only energy. In the fingers, spilling as from the stone carved mouth of a fountain. The act of writing is an act of reading, the writer reveals. And mine is a religious faith in my mind. I know I cannot write, he confesses. But my mind can. Crouched over manuscripts, he refrains from touching too much his mind, I just lightly supervise. To be suspended over it, afloat, would be the ideal situation.

A writer shouldn’t limit himself. On writing Orbitor, he had but two things in mind: the name, Orbitor, a word which the English translation ‘Blinding’ cannot capture in all its subtleties and symbologies. The Romanian ‘Orbitor’ is a fundamentally mystical light, possessing a metaphysical aura, a depth of the divine. The second drive to the project: to write over a thousand pages. And so unravelled the shining sequence, Cărtărescu’s trilogy, ‘Blinding.’ The three books form the corpus of a creature rife in all the symbolism of human destiny, the butterfly. It is no wonder, he muses, that the Ancient Greeks imagined the goddess of the soul, the psyche as a young girl with the wings of a butterfly. Such is the metamorphic destiny of the human: emerging at first breath in a horizontal crawling, a slow advance into earth… The closure into a chrysalis as into a coffin, the pale shrivelling of an insignificant form. And then— from this corpse-encasing cocoon, the shattering of the shell, the shedding of skins to reveal the true nature beneath— the magnificence of a winged creature that can rise above its prior blinded, limited motions. It is the hope— to resurrect as celestial beings, after a slow and painstaking dribble down the contours of an earth we only barely fathom. A human, in this way, is like the butterfly, though also like the snail who— in its unassuming exterior, leaves behind a shimmering trail, and creates as its shelter a geometrically perfect spiral of calcium, a marvel. It is like a human. An artist, Cărtărescu continues, can be a drunkard, a thief, a disgusting man. But what is marvellous in him is the act of creation, the access to the spirit. Like the snail which leaves in its wake a viscous trail of slime, a creature that looks, to some, revolting, to others, insignificant, is a pure marvel for what it carries on its back, the beauty and the burden of creation.

I’m not very much interested in Reality, the writer declares. His București, his birth city, is a city birthed in his mind, is a hallucination, an imagined vision. I am jealous of writers who own their own cities, he admits. Of Borges and Dostoyevsky, whose Buenos Aires and Saint Petersburg glitter with the granules of detail traceable in lived reality. Being a lesser writer, Cărtărescu confesses, I chose a lesser city, București. He traces how he embellishes the ruinous beauty of Romania’s capital with modern gas stations and skyscrapers, crafting with ink a citadel of iron and glass. It is a city of the mind, a city birthed in the caverns of a restlessly creative spirit yearning for something more.

Like you would predict a destiny in the dregs of coffee, or in the stained streaks of a mirror— this is how postmodern writing is to be approached. Not to be deciphered, to be understood, it is a writing that is in a perpetual process of creation. A book is akin to a double faced mirror between the reader and the writer, a dialogue distinct in each reading, in each set of eyes and mind. It is a romance, a passion between writer and reader that produces from its metaphysical intimacy a being that doesn’t age or decay, a piece of Art, a book. Creation is one stream of energy, Cărtărescu asserts. In creating art, we become our own inventors of infinity.

Chance is the cloak god wears when he walks among us.

And you? You gather a cloak of your own around your shoulders, and you call it principle. The night is harsh under the black moon, and the windows of the train carriage remain immutably ajar. Left to prostrate before this altar of wind, for lack of a spare seat, on your knees do you while away the hours that carry you, wayfarer that you are, into the dust of incumbent dawn.

What does it mean to be spun between shadows thus?

A consummation of the moment. To sweat in the carriage of the train is to ratify the pact with the cloaked god by name of chance. And when he offers you a drink in his own dusty corner of the carriage, take heed to drop your head and oblige. Feeble is the will when trapped between shadows thus; better to sink slow to surrender, tip back the neck and swallow the liquor—between chimes of the railtracks and trills of glass against glass, lock eyes with the cloaked one and make your declaration with your drink held high—it matters not what principle you toast to; in the heady breath of shadow, any hint of abstraction winks like gemstones; so clutch and seize the first you find, make an altar of ashes, kindle flames with declarations—thus may we live!

Now it is the professor who ushers you into his den, where his own madly spun cartography boasts the threads of a life close to its eclipse. Pocket his wisdom between the ribs, may it rest close to the heart, lest you forget; though his teeth are rotted and his hairs have long turned ashen, still the eyes brim with gemstones. Scattered sprigs of light are strewn—pick them up, one by one, drink to life, thy kingdom come. The chime of the railtracks resounds once more, and beneath that fated rhythm rises the voice of the professor, now left eternally to recite:

“What if, some day or some night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’...Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’”1

Beyond the window, night flees into dawn; you raise your eyes slowly to the cloaked figure before you. Still sunken to the knees, encircled by halos of dust that gleam, dimly you note the shadows that begin to disperse with daybreak. The hour shivers, the cloak is gone, left are you before this altar of wind, to the mercy of chance alone.

2

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Love torments in turning you inward— in feeling profound as elements each shadow and whisper, each breath of a bone, every hollow and groan. Find yourself in the chasm of the lover’s eyes and in the blinking shine you will divine: desperation in dreams, desire in words, love distracts in unearthing the self as a creator of worlds—

Like this, may you find an architecture of the mind, desires constructed in the carcasses of leaves, a spirit which spirals as the fractals in trees. I walk with a purpose to lose myself, the writer reveals. But to lose oneself is to see oneself, formless, voiceless, amorphous and vague... Like this may you find your dreams, as a stranger to the streets; a new way of knowing, in elements, is retrieved.

I’ve always been a stranger; a face may fade, but beneath its sediment, a place remains. Dig deeply, to earth sink softly your fingers, and may you pull to presence the person long neglected. In dust and debris a spirit breathes weak, into palms now crumbled, meet another kind of wholeness in the rustle of trees.

There is a certain necessity in irrationality— the writer believes— contradiction, paradox, all that we cannot fathom and can only brush delicate as breath: to comprehend in music and sense, as dancing shadows, or flowering incense.

To be of a place but not from a place— the necessity to be fluid as the stream. Be water, my friend, and step from the liquids anew each time, feel yourself baptised in its echo of the night. What kept me alive were my desires— speaks the subject of his words, a way of being surpassing the borders of space and birthing free in the body, a being freely embodied.

To be a shadow in a land allows one to learn the language of the flesh, for this is the home that cannot crumble, an intimacy whose hold may tremble to a rhythm of love, more warmth than in the shivers of fear, stolen silver in a spear. A refugee is without a body— nothing is further from the truth. What kept me alive were my desires— a Reality more true than the automatons of comfort that rattle in rivers down grey-enclosed streets, mute to the ecstasy of what it is to be—

To live with dignity. To allow desire to inflame the sequence of being, of dreaming, of living. I don’t mind being vulnerable about my complexity, he says, eyes to the sun, all at one, aflame. To be alive and feel oneself alive is to embrace, all-sensing, all that surpasses sense, all that is felt beyond the frontiers of human reason, human thought. I called myself a writer when I was prepared to lose my self— All you can do is feed your imagination— and then withdraw.

Words written in reflection of Sulaiman Addonia’s event concluding his tour in the UK celebrating The Seers. A beautiful evening with his beautiful words. ኵሉ ይሓልፍ ፍቕሪ ትቕጽል - kullu yihalif, fiqri yiterif - everything passes, love remains.1

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Whatever the deed, whatever the woe; whoever the man whose sins have been sown.

Conscience raps brittle knuckles on the door. It does not break the window, but treads softly on the floor.

Cold the flesh, hot the tears; nary a path to run from the fear. A bucket of water, a mouth of snow; long is the way, treacherous the road.

Children of earth for another to keep, when war snatches away whatever it can reap.

Why does the raven fate croak fortune to one child still in the womb, while another is cursed to a world of the trenches’ doom?1

Conscience comes again, soft and slow. Upon the chest those knuckles tap; are you a man of your word, or have you steeped low?

Fever thickens the spirit within; on life’s cold threshold, where sounds the final bell’s din.

Who are you, brother, on this earth now frozen? Is your blood still red, or has it grown rotten?

A child, a mother, a grandfather, a brother; encircled thus, could you wish for another?

Another indeed, an embrace long awaited. A touch laced with fever, remembered and fated.

Eyes fall shut for one final time; the bell ends its toll, leaving only the rhyme.

The other returns to a ghostly embrace; wound around the throat, rougher than lace.

Strangled by shame, son of misfortune. Never could he heed the final warning.

2

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Before all else, the man leading the lecture insists, he is an artist. A screen emanates white from behind, aglow with the words, the subject of his talk: The Aesthetics of Silence and Nature. A background in experimental music and Japanese philosophy spurs the studies of a man who devotes himself, in analysis and art, to the listening sense, sound.

Each sound has its own life, every phenomenon like a jewel alight to link each singular fragment upon the net. Like the jewel, or like droplets of rain freckling a web, each small sphere is singular, distinct, and simultaneously reflective of all. As well as possessing a life alike to humans, he claims each sound to possess its own will, and in the tremor of light in his eyes I can see he is on the brink of taking it further still, his lips aspill with the claim that beyond will, sounds too possess desires… But a laugh pulls him back, he admits this would be too bold, he does not reason why.

Music arises between the listener and the listened to. A notion I had encountered before, had carried with me into my poetry and perceptions, approach to life and others. A friend of mine had described the relation between two as the creation of music. A sonic tapestry spun in the space between singular beings. An invisible thread patterned with the tremors of a dialogue, a dance, strung like chords between singularities. An intangible instrument lies between the two: the incomprehensible intimacy of all lived things. In speaking, we are writing the traces of our listening, in creating art we arrange the traces, penetrate beauty, permanence in impermanence. Capture an illusion of eternity.

We exist upon layered planes, the lecturer claims. A twofold being-in-the-world— a comparative philosophy deriving from Heideggerian and Zen epistemologies, Christian mysticism, and elaborated largely by Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto School, Ueda Shizuteru. One plane of being is what we know as the Conventional Reality, constructed by the concrete, shared and filled with our very human signifiers, signs, symbols, languages to link us to the atoms making up all things. It is immediate and intimate with the emotions and meanings we inject into all we come into contact with. The other plane— the Hollow Expanse, is the limitless Reality underlying all things, incomprehensible in its entirety to our limited faculties. It is crucially Hollow as opposed to empty, for it is a vessel athrum with potential to be filled— by the intimacy of our human signs and emotions. A space of pure and ceaseless possibility.

We humans may sense the incomprehensible, may brush faintly as breath what we cannot with our finite minds divine. The Hollow Expanse bends beneath and around, and though we cannot live what we cannot comprehend, we bridge the rift of these realities— momentarily, delicately as the dissipations of dream. With Hollow Words, we employ a language that doesn’t make sense in the other, purely objective Reality of matter— a language of paradox, absurdity, of religion, sublimity, awe. Hollow Language attends to the cracks, incites in us sensations of distance, realisations we are living largely illusively, incomprehensibly, that there are Truths too grand to be touched by our limits. It is a trigger— Hollow Language— a jolt into awakening into this twofold ontology. A sensation of eternity can sicken and captivate— Hollow Senses in poetry and meditative awakening spill over the same space. We cannot exist there for long.

Art brushes Eternity, as does Religion— expressive instruments revealing the Hollowness (alive with possibility) of Conventional Reality. Poetry is not an imitation of the real world, it is the real world. Because the Real World is a multiplicity of possibility, is water, all-shifting. Absorbent, reflective, alive.

There exists an aesthetic category, Yūgen, a falling into ambiguity. Rooted in Zen Buddhism, classical poetry and Nō theatre, it is a sense of Beauty that obscures. In transient spaces, in hints and whispers, a motion of obscurity existing to signal the possibility of uncovering the ambiguous, manifesting the hidden, the empty. Because human expression can only crudely capture what is most Real. And most often only graze the sediments.

Human symbolic order is illusive by nature: more True would be to allow sounds their own purpose. Silence is not empty, just as an Enlightened State is not an emptying out, but a sensing comprehension of underlying unity that stuns. It is a deep attention. Akin to how sound is touch, on miniscule vibratory levels, and how space is time. The twofold ontology is not a dualism but a unity that we, in our frailty, can only comprehend in separation.

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And so, trail the track, with wild fruits on the tongue and a rain strewn air in the lungs, savour the sweet extraction of summer, for here is a summer which is sinking, with more force than it had in the lands from which you ran, yes, summer is seeping like the warmed sediment of sugar to my skin. Its perfume remains in syrup and stains upon my open palms. I inhale it quick, before the scent may with the season pass.

I trail the tremor of wings, the tangle of tram lines, the frowns and the grins of this sad little town to a silver birch, where unfurls the cluster of spiral-serving birds. A labyrinth pulls me, seeking the spirit which seeks the symbols I scatter to the skies, into its stairs and serpentines, to a clinical cocoon, lit up and infused with birdsong and water conjuring a pool of blue. And so, the dialogue may here resume, a music meanders misted and full, forming from the threads of a two-person loom.

Each person is his own myth, each encounter an echo of the song we all hold, curled in the breath of a single soul. So rare is the stranger who dares to sing to the stranger. Rarer still is the eye which, unfearing, seeks the other eye so that a separation may become a synchronicity, an isolation may become a realisation of that state of being before being, that life before demise. The spiral, the ancient ammonite which, in every breath and under earth and into skies, resides. Here, soothe the spirit of its cries, stitch from it a song, in the blooming breath of infinite life.

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So it is told in the words of an old Baltic proverb. The world is constantly observing us, our relations with one another, and with other creatures who dwell in the natural world. Through the tales of folklore and the wisdom of proverbs, the voices of the predecessors speak and linger; they remind us that we have a duty to ourselves and to each other, that there exists no boundary between the human world and the natural world; thus we must hold nature in respect and reverence.

November is a film deeply saturated with such themes. In the clutches of winter, the folk of a small Estonian village grapple with poverty and hunger. Through their strife, they seek respite through the enchantment of the forest, which brims with riddles and offers a glimmer of sanctity amid the bleak winter.

The sequence begins with the kratt, an architectonic jumble of bones and timber which is animated with a life of its own. This creature appears in many Estonian folktales, known as a treasure-bearer, though dealt with suspicion, for one must take heed of its mischievous tendencies. As the folklore goes, the kratt is constructed by its master from miscellaneous objects found in the household or the forest. To bring it to life, the master must make a deal with the devil, giving him three drops of blood in exchange for the soul.

Such threads of mythology and folklore are interwoven within the fabric of the film. As the villagers contend with the throes of winter’s hardship, as well as the enduring conflicts of the human condition, the wink of enchantment is ever-present, offering a glint of faith to the tenebrous landscape. The sufferings induced by unrequited love quickly unfold through the eyes of Liina, a young woman who has fallen for a fellow villager, who in turn has eyes for another. Both strive in vain to win the hearts of their respective beloveds, yet are met only with the cold and empty embrace of winter. The older generations of the village observe the unravelling of these lovelorn souls; through the prevailing torments of love, a bridge between old and young, past and present, is formed.

The perennial nature of such strife offers its own kind of comfort, silent and imperceptible, yet omnipresent, in the world of humanity and nature alike. Even the lake recites its own romantic lamentation, in a haunting sequence which recalls the tragedy of a past generation of lovers. They, too, suffered at the hands of love, forced apart by circumstance. And nature bore witness to it all.

The precedence of nature is an integral facet of Estonian folklore. Ancient tales about origins tell of a tree which forms the centre of the world; everything that constitutes life is locked in orbit around this tree, even the skies, which are nailed there with the North Star. These animistic beliefs are preserved in folklore, which consistently honour the sanctity of nature, and the presence of a distinct spiritual essence which dwells in all things. This is reflected in the kratt, a figure which, though constructed from seemingly inanimate objects, can nonetheless be brought to life with a spirit of its own.

The intricacies of faith are also illumined and picked apart as the folktale transpires. In the backdrop of the nineteenth century, the farcical nature of Christian piety is unravelled as the village-folk receive their sacrament, before forming a line to spit it back out for the purpose of crafting bullets—bullets endowed with a supernatural power, made as they are from the body of Christ.

Such farcical humour brings a glimmer of light to winter’s grim landscape in this small village community. The strength of the human spirit is bolstered by the grain of faith that persists within. It matters not whether this faith is Christian or pagan; what remains essential is that the world continues to be sacralised, that the relationship between humanity and nature remains in constant dialogue, constant exchange. There is not one which is superior to the other; the natural world is not there for man to dominate. Rather, it is a source of reverence, a numinous power which must be treated with respect. For, as the Estonian folklore reveals, perhaps you will receive a gift in return for such reverence; this could be the difference between demise and survival amid the harsh tides of winter.

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Where does the ‘I’ end and the ‘idea’ commence? In truth, there is no frontier which divides one from the other; for those who boldly commit to see their thought from its birth through to its end—those shall become both the ‘I’ and the ‘idea.’

If there was a thinker who thought so absolutely as to become these very thoughts themselves—to breathe them, to live them, and to convulse with every birth pang as each idea is conceived—it would be Nietzsche. The spirited passion with which he theorised is a testament to his commitment to plunge himself straight into the shadowy well of thought—and to emerge soaked to the bone with the substances beyond matter which comprise the spirit. Passion: that which must be endured, as the etymology hails it. Such endurance was vital to live as Nietzsche did, afflicted as he was with recurrent migraines, nausea, deteriorating vision, and eventually madness. His corporeal sufferings paralleled the intellectual battleground that governed his internal rhythms. Such a condition was, to him, integral to the conception of his thought.

“Spirit is that life which itself cuts into life: with its own torment, it increases its knowledge” —Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “And the happiness of the spirit is this: to be anointed and to be consecrated through tears, like a sacrificial animal.

“And the darkness of the blind man and his seeking and groping shall yet bear witness to the power of the sun into which he gazed.”

The sufferings of his own physical sickness, and the psychic torment which trailed every parry of his ideas, were an essential element of Nietzsche’s process of thought. As expressed by Lou Salomé, “the more winged, urgent and passionate one’s thoughts, the more comprehensive and severe must be the matter and form by which one is dominated and bound.” To submerge oneself into Nietzsche’s work is to fly with every swing of the pendulum which follows the tumult of his experience. For his philosophy and his lived experience are one. In leaning exhilaratingly into each passion and throe of his intellectual odysseys, he rallied against the normative conception of the philosopher as a detached, dispassionate seeker of truth. Nietzsche advocated for the necessity of passion, emotion and sensuality in such a pursuit. Recall the question with which Beyond Good and Evil commences: “Suppose that truth were a woman: what then?” Such a question reshapes truth into something to desire. Far from seeking truth through formulaic reasoning which divorces one from passion, Nietzsche exalted such a quest as one driven by emotive desires, senses and devotion.

Threaded within this philosophy, is the parallel necessity of untruth. To exalt the riddle, and not the answer. “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.” (On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense). Truth, for Nietzsche, is but an anthropomorphism, a metaphor, for it is only through the delimitations of human faculties, and the restrictive mechanisms at our disposal (namely, language), that we can hope to glean the thing in its essence. The thing-in-itself is, therefore, only ever sketched within the bounds of human frontiers; “what the investigator of such truths is seeking, is only the metamorphosis of the world into man.”

In parallel, to recognise untruth as a condition of life is to conceive a philosophy beyond good and evil. Nietzsche stresses that the falsity of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to it, for error has its merits too. Is not the artist the prophet of untruth? Is it not through falsehood that art is born? Thus does Nietzsche challenge the dispassionate solemnity with which those defenders of truth command themselves, unwilling to accept that the truth needs not defending. Value rests, Nietzsche argues, in questions and good humour over such solemnity. Knowledge is an everlasting venture into the labyrinth, not a bed to rest on—and: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies” (Human, All-Too-Human).

One must keep the mind ajar to let the winds of possibility in. To recognise the limits of human comprehension, to see the value in the riddle, the infinite plains where dwell the answers—perhaps the task of the thinker is to run spirals around those deserts and never tire of such iterations, rather than to march on in a single track in vain pursuit of the mirage. For truth is not something refinable, attainable through single-tracked convictions. Though the whirling circles of the riddler may appear fruitless, self-defeating, even mad, there is value in such an eternal recurrence. With each loop of the spiral, new fields of vision emerge—the mind is constantly turning, fluid, in motion, and through such convulsions can Thought be shaped and reshaped anew. If one latches upon fixed convictions and pursues the single path dug out of such convictions, one compresses the field of vision to a single delimited point—like peering into the eye of a needle.

Through the motion afforded by the turbulence of emotion, can the mind brighten with new dawns and infinite pathways. Thus is the nature of the tertium quid, to wander eternally between pathways, beyond dogma. To embody the question, and to leave oneself gaping and open for all the exhilarating monsoons of the unknown.

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It is the only place the sun reaches, fallen weakly; a lone patch littered with crumpled tickets and the burnt stubs of cigarettes, and moving over it, two figures stretch, elastic and indistinct. Their sounds stretch to you first… Misted and acrid, as though birthed in a pool of wine; electric strings tremor a melody full of longing, the kind that digs itself despairingly into being, knowing itself nothing more than a dream. And a voice, equally estranged, hoarse and soaked in this lethargy of an emotional overflow, sinks into the stutter of strings. Words you cannot distinguish, only sensation, plume from invisible lips and you step closer, completely spellbound.

The song seals itself into silence as soon as you take the step that sends their faces into sharp relief, lifted from the damp haze of shadow. The singer’s lips are still parted with the release of song, and it is like you can see the residues of melody dripping limpidly out from their plum-hued edges. A trace of lipstick on the tooth paints her face in a dishevelment that extends itself from the song, the dishevelment of desire, tainted with something desperate. Darkened eyebrows arch over eyes pressed closed, creasing the browns of a hastily drawn wing at their edges, as though it is the wing of a broken bird, a flight that found itself falling. You are startled when her eyes begin to crack open, like a chrysalis on the brink of birthing a thing of beauty, and somehow you cannot remain to witness what creature or colours will scuttle out from an iris, a pupil, a gaze: somehow, the only thing to do is to look away. You only catch the corners of the eyes, which part like the corners of a mouth– a confused shame sends your gaze to fall instead upon the man beside.

The first thing you notice is the hand upon the instrument, like a lover’s hand which finds itself upon the skin of the beloved, because this is the most natural place for it to rest. Elongated fingers entwine themselves to the guitar’s neck, and they are twitching so subtly, only the sharpest of eyes would notice. Yes, the fingers twitch, just as the remnants of song had twitched upon the lips of the singer, it is still stirring its final breaths there upon his hands. A greasy tangle of hair falls over half of his face, but through a sliver like light through barely parted curtains, an eye falls through, and it is angled in an intimate and delicate pride towards she. And you, the onlooker, tread in delicacy back, almost falling over yourself, all at once feeling that you have stepped in on a scene you are not supposed to see. You cannot think what in the world brought you here, to the saddest place in the city, a metro misted in misery; you scrape a hand through the hanging threads of your hair, eyes darting in and around, and you are mutely surprised to feel a trembling weakness swelling out from your chest to your hands.

“Where are you going, friend?” The guitarist pulls you with his gaze, smiling with only one side of his lips, and all of his eyes. His question lifts itself in a strange undulation, sharp and out of place. He brings the plectrum nervously to his lips, reaching out a hand to introduce himself. Everything in the way he speaks is elaborated in odd emphases, and you are quick to discern the poorly imitated foreign accent. It is a voice adopted to send him deeper into the spaces of disconnect, of obscurity, a voice that feeds with pitiful desperation into the wish that he only happened to stumble into that dying city, that he wasn’t really from there. You know that the two buskers had grown up on these very streets, for you have seen them countless on mornings stepping from the apartment circling the corner of your own.

Just as you part your lips to answer, still at loss for what to say, you are spared any need to, for in that moment a breath of dust-filled air gushes like water in from the centre of the station, and wrapped inside it is a crawling mass of people, all scurrying like a stream of ants past the musicians, trampling the lone splash of sunlight to sink up the steps and into the gaping outside. “Oh!” A hoarse cry falls from the quickly fallen smile, and the two musicians drop in synchronicity to the floor, hands splayed out in fevered search. The heaving current of air and passersby had lifted the few banknotes that had lain in a sad pool upon the guitarist’s case, and they now flee upwards, flightfully twisting to a churning humidity. Four hands splay like echoed mirages up and around, but the meagre earnings are already lost in the hungry mouth of the sky; with them, scatter their visions of a life far beyond that dust-infested land.

In the frenzy of the search, the guitar lays forgotten, face down, strings pressed and humming in a crushing communion with the ground.

Each encounter splinters the self into another fragment; a fragment into which the perceiver peers and constructs her own vision. It is a vision of the moment, sculpted upon the scaffold of present circumstance. Toss a mask and don another: the degree to which we are conscious of such shifting of the self fluctuates—for some, the change in persona is more pronounced, with a different mask slipped on for each encounter. Yet for others, the change is much more subtle, not conscious at all, but governed by the perception of the other. For under the eyes of another, we become their object, they ours. The stranger I observe at the railway station is, in my eyes, an impulsive man of ill temper, prone to bouts of aggression; this judgement is sketched out of a moment in time which saw him yell incessantly at the young boys beside him, not sparing a chance for reconciliation. I knew a mere ten minutes of the man; a myopic view, but a view all the same, for now he is lodged in my memory, a being with impulses, behaviours and idiosyncrasies which toss and breathe with a life of their own, even after he has long since disappeared down the railway tracks.

You can never truly know another person, even those held dear. Yet something persists which is common to all, an underlying locus which constitutes the human condition and brings the stranger to the same level of intimacy as the beloved. Hesse claims that as a body, everyone is single; as a soul, never. Perhaps it is this dictum which infuses the human condition with a certain universality. There are pervading questions which form an axis mundi around which we each revolve; questions universal to being—questions concerning suffering, meaning, desires, fears, conscience. It is these questions which ring out in the chambers of being constructed in Kieślowski’s Dekalog. In the claustrophobic corridors of a Warsaw apartment complex, the inhabitants follow their own labyrinthine troubles, obsessions, confrontations, and in so doing, find their pathways momentarily intersect. The subtlety of their interconnectedness is a nod to the invisible and inexplicable hand of fate.

On Conscience

Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience. But nothing is a greater cause of suffering (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov).

I remember walking between the sour cherry trees two months ago when the tall man asked me: what is conscience? Now I return to the question, with a nudge from Kieślowski, whose cycle of Dekalog grapples with such a riddle and source of torment.

The conscience is a weight like a stone in the ribcage, which tips from one side to another in times of crisis, or circumstances which beg for delicate resolution. These are times which expect an act derived from personal will; I myself hold the strings, and I myself steer the course of what follows. Conscience speaks in such a circumstance; it emerges from somewhere in the well of unconscious thought where senses of must and musn’t are born. A sense of right and wrong. But how are we to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil? Answers can be sought in scripture, in moral codes which govern religious or societal structures. And on the psychological level? Guilt is a sure signifier that one has committed wrong—but does such a feeling precede these external moral creeds, or only arise in consequence of it?

Biblical scripture tells that guilt sprang from the first act of sin; the bite of the apple as a conscious act of will, disobedience to the word of God, a deliberate disregard for a divine command which birthed an inheritance of guilt, intrinsic guilt, within the human condition. Perhaps we can regard guilt as the maturation of conscience (the consequence of failing to heed the voice of you must). The maturation of conscience if applied correctly is silence (according to A. Gaxiola Lappe, and I am inclined to agree).

The question follows as to whether conscience is something retrospective or precedent. I asked several people the question of what is conscience, curious to glean different perspectives on this. According to A. Gaxiola Lappe, conscience can be summarised as: a moral afterthought to our actions or inactions. Conscience, therefore, is something retrospective. Yet I cannot reconcile myself with this conclusion. Conscience funnels you to a corner and hands you the reins of your own fate; rather than emerging in the afterlight, it is a moment on the brink of (in)action in which you must decide whether to heed the voice of must or mustn’t.

M. Schmidt declares conscience to be worthless in retrospect, as that is the realm of shame and guilt. Conscience is the pull away from falling off the narrow path. It breathes right next to you, a face pressed up against yours, but on the side, facing the same direction, looking at the same dilemma.

To return to Kieślowski himself, he offers his own answer: there is something like a barometer in each of us, which tells us the limits of what we must and mustn’t do. The concept of sin is tied up with this abstract, ultimate authority which we often call God. But there is also a sense of sin against yourself (which means the same thing). Usually it results from weakness, from the fact that we’re too weak to resist temptation (Kieślowski on Kieślowski, 1993).

The suffocation of moral degradation dwells within each of us, in the recesses of the self that C. Jung would call the shadow. It is a twilight figure which inhabits the unconscious, and it is up to the individual to reconcile himself with his shadow in the process of maturation as a being. The interdependence of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is an integral facet of the human condition and the process of becoming. It recalls the law of juxtaposition: without the shadow, there can be no light; without hell, there can be no heaven. The interplay and entanglements of moral quandary suffuse the heavy air of Kieślowski’s Dekalog; it scrutinises the intricacies of the conscience and illumines the quiet irony of some divine hand which overlooks these moral throes. Amid the complexities of human will and (in)action, glares a light of some ineffable, numinous power which is in some form the maker of our fates. This tension between individual will and external forces swings back and forth like a pendulum—the resulting turbulence is the subject of Dekalog’s parablistic tales.

In each instalment of the cycle, there drifts a wanderer, restless and unknown as he moves between frames. He has no influence on the events that unfold, he only watches, observes, lingers in the corners and thresholds of the crises our characters confront. Kieślowski recalls that some called him ‘the angel’, and the taxi drivers when they brought him on set would call him ‘the devil.’ But in the screenplays, he was always described as: ‘young man.’

Esse est percipi: to be is to be perceived. Perhaps our young man, the ever-present drifter between frames, is a kind of grand perceiver, an indifferent god, a quiet maker who dwells on the fringes. Or perhaps he is a drifter and no more. Each has his life to live; we are drawn into the hearts and minds of the principal characters by blind chance, that is all. I believe everybody’s life is worthy of scrutiny, has its secrets and dramas, writes Kieślowski. We wanted to begin each film in such a way to suggest the camera had picked out a person by random. The camera had not landed upon this young drifter, but in another reality, it could be the obsessions and torments of this very man that we find ourselves scrutinising. Perhaps it is blind chance that is the quiet maker of our perceptions and our fates amid these interlocking threads of being.

I

I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other God but me.

Spilled ink over paper betrays a clumsy spirit, within a clumsy corpus. Fragile is the altar upon which his god is propped. “Pick a god and pray,” came the chant upon the grave of the old almighty, but too hasty was he to prostrate before reason.

To worship idols as though they were irrefutable, to believe that all can be measured, that we may map this web of being like cartographers of existence. It is born from desperation for control, hunger for predictability. Yet the quiet irony of some divine hand is quick to fling such a notion to the ether. Victims as we are to the whims of chance, it is wise to know our bounds; to nod yes, I know but a speck of this vast cosmic web.

It is as Dostoyevsky said: You can only begin to understand humanity if you first understand the thread of irrationality that runs beneath it. To place all faith in scientific rationale is to blind oneself to the unpredictable, inexplicable and irrational ways of being in the world. Such certainty in knowledge can only lead to illusions of the extent of our control. Life cannot be lived by a formula.

God has been traded for reason, but to say that god is dead would be deceptive; better to say “we have misplaced His image: where to find Him again?”

II

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

The conscience stirs in trapdoors and back alleys, circumstances which funnel you to a corner and hand you the reins of your own fate—here is born must and mustn’t, here arises the premonition of guilt. For guilt is the maturation of conscience (the consequence of failing to heed the voice of you must). The maturation of conscience if applied correctly is silence.

III

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Amid tram lines encrusted with frost, mirrors of black ice and skies as cold and unblinking as the abyss, stirs a chimera of desire—fused inextricably with its janus-twin, violence. At what point does the desire to possess become the desire to kill? A death drive hurtling toward the other, the self—it hardly matters for under the command of infatuation, the division is no more. I once dreamt I saw you with your neck broken and your tongue lolling out. Like a riddle whispered in the dark, the two careen into the night, tossing torments between them, surrendering to imminence, imminent death, imminent life—to exist, to exist—to love and to forfeit one’s will for such an affliction—to die and to wish—to exist, to exist!

IV

Honour thy mother and thy father.

Born of mother and father. When they are illusory, absent or dead, where does that leave one? Her origins are a myth, roots curl and crumble to soil—there she stands in the wilting light, and the letter grows damp in her palms. Veil of cold sweat upon the skin, veil of mist over her eyes, the drop of dread, desire, distress, within the ribcage, hollow, so hollow, yet somehow overflowing—who are you afraid of: me or yourself? Two candles tremble with dusk.

How to explain the desire that dwells behind the mirror, in the shadows? Desire emerges eternally entwined with dread, desire, dread, desire once again—it scratches tentatively in the well of the stomach, it threads its serpentine pathways beyond the known bounds of morality, of understanding—the maddening lines that smudge and blur and emerge in all sharpness again—how to return, return to some form of stable clarity, of control? Once the glass of illusion has been shattered, there is no reversal, no repair. The time now is to live with the shards even as they pierce the soles of the feet—such pain is necessary, perhaps, to serve some signifier that she treads beyond the bounds of creed. Two candles tremble, and are extinguished. Left is she with her shadows.

V

Thou shalt not kill.

“Life—that is: continually shedding something that wants to die; Life—that is: being cruel and inexorable against anything that is growing weak and old in us, and just in us. Life—that is: being devoid of respect for the dying, the wretched and the aged? Always being a murderer? And yet Moses said: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

(F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science)

VI

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Tread lightly upon the cold floors of the mind—tread lightly, lest you disturb the shadows. Two twilight figures dwell in those depths. One opens his palm and says: here, take this spectacle and with it, a way of seeing. The other offers his own hand and says: come with me, I will show you the way of being.

Perception precedes being. Under the spectacled gaze of the other, the way of being comes to fruition. The desires and the manifold, living husks that clothe them—they stir and twist beneath the gaze. Strained glimpses as though squinting through the eye of a needle—only a fragment of the kaleidoscope can he see. To be confronted with another individual, an entire labyrinth of spirals and shadow, yet blind to full being.

Esse est percipi.

VII

Thou shalt not steal.

Blood runs sour: a mother, a daughter; a hope, a mask; a prayer, an illusion. To watch this bitter theatre unravel, to stand on in the fringes as she sheds those skins, long wilted, and steps nimbly into another—watch as she boasts another mask, flashes another robe, paints a smile so wide and bright—how to keep up with this farce—how to wear those shimmering robes when they have grown too small? Now the chest is constricted so—she cannot breathe, cannot keep—up with this facade so vile, so bitter—flight, flight, is the only curative. Seize what is mine and flee, flee, this nausea—flee—

You robbed me of yourself, of the two of you, of everything.

VIII

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

The judge that dwells within each of us stirs at the knell of circumstance. Situations bring out the good or the evil in a person. The conscience nudges here or yonder, the doubt itches deep within, far beyond the surface where it can be scratched to relief. The past shifts, restless, there at the edge, ever-present, ever-troubled.

If there is a void, I beg you throw my humiliation within.

If there is a void, I myself will jump within, for I can only escape the past through obliteration.

IX

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife.

“He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”

(Sigmund Freud)

X

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.

Insatiable creature of a day, satisfaction will remain but a mirage in the desert. Where there is matter, there is greed; where there is greed, there is rot upon the soul. What remains? Blind husk of deceit and desire.

White clematis scours and scrawls its dreams into morning; with tides of mist they stretch and slumber, glints of white now sunken into brown, a premature fall, into arms of a small death which cradles, heave, ho, heave, ho, echo of the sailor’s chant she begged of him to sing as they crawled up the corridor with the zimmerframe—how I swept the flakes of dead skin from the threshold, I inhale their slow disintegration and in my recollection seek to preserve some small glint—the flight across mountains to Constanța, the ripple of twigs in the river, the sketches of a Tehran palace, the prophecies etched into scraps of tissue—I flit from here to there and carry each small death in my palms like marbles—another, another, filled to overflowing they burst from their cocoons into flight, ecstatic flight,

II

A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne, says Nietzsche in the chamber of my skull—I scrub the mirror and with it my reflection, sprawling tremors, there a smudge of brown, a grin of green, something uncanny, something liquid, until clarity returns and with it my lucid gaze and the hint of a thread behind the surface of the mirror—one only has to reach between the folds to find those tears in the fabric of things.

III

You should always be wanted! said he with his eyes wide and winding with threads of red—folded cotton fidgets beneath my palms, I restore the order, only to placate the man behind me defiant in his wheelchair, lucid in his bounds; a square painted in white, clinical white, is his world now, for now, yet such white reeks of eternity, with its hollow heights and heady breath, how can one stand to spare more than a glance at such a shade—shade, shade! The very lack of shade, shadow, depth, is where lies the horror—give me the blackness of the well, the dark side of the moon, the shadows of the willow tree, the shadow of my self. I cannot be reconciled with white. I cannot be reconciled with eternity.