once-hyperion

[once-hyperion]

A Death Note From Hell On Earth (The metaphysics of love thereafter)

I am lying in my bed, covered in sweat from the chemo that has been pumped throughout my body. I’m sick, I’m tired and I can’t truly imagine what it would be like to not be sick. What I mean is I am in so much discomfort and pain that I can’t see what living otherwise would be like. I have contemplated certain ideas while being glued to this bed, some of which are the usual things philosophers do, which is contemplate death, living, what is my life worth, did I accomplish what I wanted etc. But what I eventually landed on was love and what that meant to me. Why was love the thing I landed on eventually and why is it the thing I write about now? For I have been thinking about this subject extensively for years, but never knew I was thinking of it in the traditional sense. I was living it unconsciously. As vicarious as it sounds I was truly living it through the unconscious reality that plagues most of us throughout our years. But now it has reached the forefront of my mind for where I have drawn these conclusions.

Love is a leap of faith. For one to be totally confident in their love is not truly “in love”. To be in love is to take the gamble in knowing that what you might do is a risk. Without the risk you don’t have true authentic love. The leap is that middle ground of Geist, the world between love and no love, that is where the magic truly happens. For you can never truly fall in love with the perfect person because within that true sense of love there has to be something that is an imperfection that the other party embodies. This I see as true love, it begins at the moment when you are able to say that you still love them with that imperfection included. The imperfections of one make the perfections bearable to endure. This is often called in psychoanalytic terms, the “Object Cause of Desire” (Objet petit a) that thing to which desire is never fulfilled. This “Objet petit a” is never reached to which yet you ascribe your pursuit toward. This is what makes you fall in love to the sign of imperfection.

This objective beauty that people sometimes tend to refer to as the “ideal form of beauty” I believe is true in a crude platonic sense. There are objectively beautiful things in this world, music to be exact. But this objectivity resides deep in the heart of the message the song produces for its audience. This experience sometimes touches that vulnerable part of the soul that has not been reached by the other things that intrigue or trigger emotion. That moment when the song penetrates the thin barrier that surrounds the pit of emotion that resides deep down in the soul, eventually cries out in tears when the beautiful melody or lyric strikes it, much like a hammer that strikes a nail. But nonetheless, love can be objectively precise for the very reason that love cannot be physical. What I mean by this is that love is not a physical objectification, love is a feeling. Love has to be that thing that keeps life going, but on the level of Geist or spirit. Beyond the physical, it steps into the metaphysical. That is why for those who are truly in love I would classify them as metaphysicians in the pure sense. Because on a daily basis they deal with one of the hardest things to ensure which is what we call true love.

~Desponia~

[once-hyperion]

A Death Note From Hell on Earth (Response to Desponia)

I saw a man die face down in his blood on the floor earlier this week. He was a man here in the ward who had just moved in a little over a month ago. He sat crisscrossed in the middle of the rec room talking about how he had travelled all around the Middle East mentioning places such as Syria, Palestine, Israel, Iran and more. He told us how he flew out of Ciro during the war and went on bombing missions in North Africa. He was captured as a POW in Morocco in 1943 and remained a prisoner until the conclusion of the war. This man is a war hero, and by God he has been in institutions since 1957 when he had a nervous breakdown following a car crash that triggered an emotional wreckage in his psyche. This man needs to be treated with some respect I say. But instead they keep him on the 31st floor here, locked in his cage, allowed to mingle with the whole lot for a few hours a day and then “back to your room Mr. Maligianti”. Like I said before, he’s been here a little over a month and he has been nothing but a pleasure to talk to and be around. He goes on about his deranged war stories about the B-52 bomber squad he flew with named the “Purple Ingrids”. Their logo was a purple bird flying with a bomb tucked in its feet’s, ready to drop. The emotions this man puts into the stories of his life are breathtaking and shouldn’t be glossed over. This man is marvelous.

Today Mr. Maligianti drank his coffee, read the times and proceeded to the rec room. After he got to the rec room he turned to the doctors and pulled a piece of metal siding they put around the corners of the medicine cabinet doors in the infirmary. He thrusted the piece of sharpened medal in his throat and collapsed into a pool of his blood. He laid on the floor squirming and choking on the crimson pool that filled his mouth. The doctors and nurses rushed in to assist him to get the bleeding under control while the background was filled with laughing, crying, yelping and banging from the other patients on the 31st floor. He convulsed and convulsed until he smiled and stopped moving. Immediately I sank into my chair, seeing the terror that filled his eyes, but then, at the last moment, his pupils dilated and there was a glimmer of hope, for a split second that latched onto him. Finally, he was free. Free at last.

Mr. Maligianti had been a prisoner for over three decades, whether it had been inside a hospital, jail, war camp or even his own head, Mr. Maligianti was never free for his adult life. He knew that his life consisted of 3 square meals a day, directions, where to be on a daily basis. He knew he wasn’t able to leave. Whether it was voices inside his head or voices from outside that directed him, he was tormented by the fact that he was not free. And Unfortunately he couldn’t never be free.

The Army trains you to be killers, and a damn good job at it too. They train you to fight for your king, your family, your countrymen, your wife and your freedom. They tear your individuality out of you, replace it with a new sense of identity that does not revolve around selfhood, this identity revolves around “brotherhood” and “loyalty”. The military ads that run on television show a man who has no self worth in society due to lack of identity, moping around, proceeding to daily tasks but then joins the Marine Corps and fights alongside his fellow marine to defend his country against the enemy. The commercial displays honor, brotherhood, courage etc. A very Homeric sense of returning to a way of fighting with your hands and getting the job done with pure braun. This image of the strong trained fighters is very reminiscent of Platonic guardians that are in charge of protecting the citizens of the city in Plato’s Republic. These are the soldiers of the Army and Marine Corps. The ideological doctrine of these organizations and their way of promoting honor, courage and strength is very similar to the McDonald’s commercial I mentioned earlier. The commercials promote something that is skewed by the ideology that ensues it. The ideology of the McDonald’s burger is that if you choose McDonald’s, you are choosing the meal of winners, champions, athletes and so on. Not to mention it tastes delicious and will make you feel good. The Marine ad promotes the idea that if you choose us you are choosing the side of the guardians who will protect the city with our bare hands, one by one we will protect as brothers in arms, we will be heroic and stand tall. Not to mention you will also be highly respected by your community and be fulfilled with the idea that you chose the best. What comes next for both these examples are the side effects. The side effects of the McDonald’s ad is the obesity and unhealthy physical limitations of your body to which you will not be able to perform like the athletes you see on tv and the side effects of the military ad is post traumatic stress disorder, physical bodily dismemberment, lack of selfhood etc. like our poor friend Mr. Maligianti, he wound up expired, in a pool of his own blood because he couldn’t bare to remain a prisoner any longer. Like the drug addict at 5th and San Julian who overdoses on a speed ball of heroin and meth to the movie star on Bellagio drive who put the gun in their mouths, they were sick and tired of being prisoners.

As I saw Mr Maligianti sprawled on the floor, dripping with his own blood, moving his arms in an erratic fashion, my mind had paused and focused on the sweat that came from his brow that fell to the floor. When I noticed this I began to laugh, laugh in the face of Mr Maligianti, not because I thought of this painful death as amusing, but because I saw the absurdity in his life, my life and all our lives. That trickle of sweat (as they say) took the cake for me. It showed how a simple bead of sweat can turn a horrible situation into a laughing stock of painfully ripe emotion. As the nurses ran back and forth I stared into his black empty eyes that once was a lively provocative older man, now an empty husk of a human. The shouting and banging rang through the ward like a siren that kept blaring. The mental states of some of these individuals here were not even comprehensible to the fact that Mr. Maligianti won’t be enjoying his coffee tomorrow morning, instead, tomorrow Mr. Maligianti will be burning in the crematorium for the next three hours, roasting like a pig over a campfire, with all the fat and oil, dripping down to the hot coals below.

After my laughter had ceased, I tended to the rec room for my daily afternoon card game that usually consists of me leaving with more cigarettes that what I came with, I’m pretty good at this game. I noticed the crowd was unusually rowdy today, after the stir up with the whole Mr Malgianti thing, so I used this opportunity to take advantage of the others by making outrageous bets, acting as if I was bluffing my way through. I only play pocket pairs, they thought otherwise. But other than that, the day wasn’t too unusual. Oh, the coffee was a bit stronger today maybe.

But as I lay here in my bed, on the 31st floor, I run through my head the reasons why we all came to be here. Not just here in the hospital but here in this cruel world. Reasons that I can’t quite imagine, but can blurt out with no thought at all. Nothing sounds logical to me, nothing seems to be of great reason, but the fact is that we are here. I didn’t ask to be brought here? I didn’t ask to be born? The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has been robbed from me, taken from me years ago by the very people who swore to protect it. I never hurt anyone? I never threatened any persons life? So why have my rights been swept under the rug? Better yet, swept into these four stone walls that emit insanity inside and out. Wether you are physically restrained by men in white who keep you within the walls of a psych ward, a drill sargent who makes you feel like you are worth more for being here than out there, or the recipient of test results that confirm the cancer you are dying from, we are all prisoners, and the sooner you realize this, the sooner you can live.

~Hyperion~

[once-hyperion]

A Death Note From Hell on Earth (Responded)

Another Way To Die

I have received your message...you think I chose this? I don’t understand the complexity of my thoughts, interactions etc. all I know is the here and the now. The moment as they would say. What shall I do then? Learn Turkish, move to Istanbul, sing with the songbirds that work in the harem, through joy and fame become the best instantiation of the monotonous life that plagued the mother before me? No, these thoughts interject my heart to which I cannot otherwise consider a role in such a place. Joy, pleasure, please, I haven’t felt those emotions in years. The last I heard of joy in my heart was when I considered ending it all. But somehow I didn’t make that move. Instead I tried to rejoice in the sorrow of my life. Does that mean that I consider life actually worth living because I didn’t have the guts to cut it short? I guess so. 

I guess when one doesn’t end it, it protects the foundations of what it means to be human, it protects the intersection of complete dismal destruction of the universe and the preservation of love, love for the sake of going on to the next day. From the ruins of Dresden to the metropolis of New York City, the mediation between the two seems to have fascinated you. The stagnation of Achilles arrow as you described being in flux or simply being has been the puzzle. Let me ask you, can there be a possibility of both stagnation and flux happening to the arrow at any point in time along its flight path? I encourage you to consider the possibility that there might be a third option. Why is it only a binary for most? The truth tends to lie between the binary to which this is never offered up. It’s either right or wrong, mind or body, red pill or blue pill and so on. Like our forefathers before us who made these decisions and the people who shall come after us, they will face the same contingencies. The puzzle still constrain’s even the most powerful of individuals who seem to have the most wit. This does not come down to brains but rather ideology. The path to which one can come down depends on the guide who takes them. The path that is obscured might entice even the most dreary of adventurers, but at what cost, the cost of your mental facticity might be at stake, but isn’t it the truth you seek? The truth has been bestowed upon me, the truth has set me free. 

Be that I received news of cancer, I went to see a witch in search of ailments for this wretched disease. My original thought was “surely this is not put here by purpose, but by accident? It has to be by accident, chance you might say.” The battle I face with this cancer has brought on new engagements in thought. The hatred I have is very much related to the feud between Salieri and Mozart, this is the feud I have with this cancer. The carelessness, the ego, the underachievement that I have lived with my entire life ceased to be when I found out I have this cancer. The cancer drove me to envision a more complete and austere life, one I am more fond of. This creature called cancer could take any woman who has engaged in the monotony of life and turn her into the most powerful being on this planet, or it can suck you dry like the worthless piece of meat you are. 

When I saw the witch I approached with caution, skepticism, knowing that I could be walking into a trap, a trap of generalized conceptions of astrological nonsense that anyone with half a brain could spot as a scam. But instead she started with nothing more than reading my tarot cards. She drew five cards that resided on the corner of her brown oak desk, she cautioned me to not be upset with the initial cards that are drawn because it all is contingent upon what the collection of five together means. I agreed, but was terrified to see what the witch was to uncover. She flipped the five cards and my tarot was death, death, death, thief, sun. She told me to brace myself for what she is about to tell me. What this combination of cards shows according to her is that I am a very lonely and desperate person that seeks something more fruitful in life. The thief and the sun combined show that I live my life through outside forces, to which they heavily influence my perception on most things. This shows that I have no original selfhood, I live my life through others and what they think of me. The three death cards together symbolize that I don’t have a lot of time here in this life. This cancer has brought me here, here to these thoughts and to this letter I write to you. The witch has shed light onto the life I lived and what I do with us is up to me. That is why I am here. 

In this room that I sit in, staring at a wall plastered with a single crucifix is where I realize, this was no accident, this was on purpose. God had done this to me, God had put this inside of me. And at that very moment where I looked up at the crucified Christ, hanging with the look of pain, arms stretched with nails driven through, and a crown of thorns digging into the flesh. I realized he was my enemy. God was laughing at me when he gave me the cancer. He wants to see me suffer. The cancer seems to resemble the loving faith in God that I had believed my entire life. The faith rests on your prayer, acknowledgement, forgiveness and soul. This plague has since replaced the faith in God to where I pray to this cancer. I acknowledge its presence, I forgive it for it knows not what it is doing, it is only doing what it is told and I can feel it’s presence in my soul. What I might be feeling there is death, creeping slowly like a deranged monster that will never stop hunting until it gets you, no matter how long and hard you try to run away, it is certain that it will only stop once it gets you. Once this is accepted, things become more humorous and obscene, for life becomes less strenuous and more absurd. 

The witch gave me a totem made of wood and ivory, with a single wolf's tooth protruding from the top. I saw this as novel, yet I still accepted it and carried it around with me on my daily tasks and errands. The totem was blessed with herbs prior to being released to me to ensure that the energy of the witch had been released and the energy from myself had now been transferred over. Again, I see this as a bit of hoopla, but for some reason I can't let it go. I feel like the thought of letting it go might produce something horrible in my life, much worse than the cancer, but what could be worse than the cancer. The totem might give me a glimmer of passion, a bit of something to look forward to while I wither away. 

As I refuse to see any doctors again after this experience, I discovered this horrible disease and what do they do? They stick me with the bill, always the end goal for these profound men of medicine. As if the diagnosis wasn't enough, now I have a bill that will be passed on down to my kids. An outrageous figure, one that only a sick person would receive of course. This world of going back and forth, bill after bill, heartbreak after heartbreak is not a world I am going to be in for too much longer. This world has become a world of nothing, emptiness, void whatever you want to call it, there is nothing left in this world to be looking forward to except this thing called death. But before I go there is something I want you to know.

I'll admit it, the life I lived was pathetic, I failed. We knew each other for such a brief time, but enough time for each other to make impacts on the soul. After the smirky comments and witty remarks that hinted toward the wrong doings in my early life, I would pray to God to rid me of these terrible thoughts of isolation, depression and anxiety and fill me with joy. I would beg “please give me that for once, I am sick of feeling this way.” But now that I lay here in my bed, staring at the wall with the crucifix mounted high above me, I am beginning to understand the complexity of my inner workings as a message. This message was that I was not supposed to feel happy, but rather feel misery by God. The peace that I grant him is that he gave me the ability to feel. To feel pain is to still feel something, something much more dull than the happy exciting lives of those around me, I still felt. “I still felt” is what I tell myself quite often these days. I still felt what was left of a subjective experience, one that lacked the moments of pleasurable existence, but still “I felt”.” “I still felt” I will quietly hum to myself, “I still felt”, but time will take care of that, until I feel no more.  

~Desponia~

[once-hyperion]

A Death Note From Hell on Earth

Your Power, What Do You Say?

I write to you not because I want anything, but because you need something. Brilliant and postulate facts unto which the scene, so savory has bestowed upon myself to make contact with you. The presumptuous forethought of one's lifestyle contains a much deeper and hidden message into their unconscious. The unsolved and recurring feeling of doubt has me puzzled to which I am not even determined at this point to uncover the worst of the worst, deepest of the deep, fear.

I hold on to what I cannot let go, but to what degree have I lost what has already been gone for sometime now? What I don’t see is the sadness, the anger, the pity, the repetition of how can you be this way? Is this how it is going to be forever? Why am I here? Why are you here? I ask this from the depths of my hellish heart, what is it that you are expecting from me? Why are you holding me back? Why am I asking these questions in thought rather than in the flesh? To cut a gangrenous limb, one must imagine the consequence before it is too late. Like a smokers dream to quit, or a soldier's thought of something better than this pain inside my gut, this keeps us moving. Love on the other hand is the promise that makes the tallest man shrink to his knees. As does the song writer who temporarily displays the piece for all to see in the most vulnerable way possible, the depths of his soul are on the floor for all to step on and toss about. Emotionally traumatizing and enticing for the poet to which he angrily plays his piano for the crowd that snickers yet claps when he pauses after his final note.

“Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails;”. 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

To make love a personal insecurity is to make love a particularly violent act. To that which we conflate the idea that when one receives something that is desired, it truly isn’t enough. As time lingers on, that new thing becomes just a thing, nothing desirable anymore. The desire for desire itself is strong, strong enough to drive a man insane through lustfulness, greed or jealousy. To what can we make of this if we are all bound by the desire for desire it’s self? Shall we always rotate the crops when something becomes stale, boring, uninteresting, uninspiring ? Is it not humble to be thankful for what we have? Is it love that we crave? Is it that we truly haven’t found love, is love the completeness? As for Aristophanes, the completeness of man was the two halves, rolling around joined as one until Zeus became greedy and split us apart, forcing us to search for our other half. Is this desire for true love what we seek in place of fortune, status, aesthetics? To make love a personal insecurity leads to ressentiment toward the object of frustration. Through your lack of personality and few words, the face of anxiety that once sought to try to be a stronger, more courage’s person has fallen off the horse and into the mud to which weakness and jealousy has overcome the very beast you swore to slay. Ressentiment feeds off envy and inferiority. The crippling feeling that takes hold of you when you cross the threshold. That sickness that you wish would go away, that pain inside your chest that tightens every time you remember that you have a tightness in your chest because you are an emotional cripple. You face it every waking moment, it becomes a part of your routine, breathe, breathe. The corner of your vision becomes blurred, breathe, breathe. The sound becomes much louder, breathe, breathe. You fall down into the darkest abyss to which it is so deep all he can do is stand above and watch you, call your name and render it is okay, while you slowly drag him down with you.

Breathe softly and not so violently for the scene has ended and act II has already begun. Between the blinds you peak through, what have you got to do or say to give yourself peace of mind? To focus not on Achilles arrow when it was released from his bow, or even to where it hit its target, but what happened in between is the world of becoming, the restlessness that pumps through your veins. Instead you reside in the world of being. Stagnation at its finest. Breathe, breathe. You seek matrimony, instead you need therapy. You briefly display a life of joy to those you haven’t even met, yet you cannot even speak to those around you for your tongue doesn’t move. The younger and more vigorous side of you has yet to emerge and become. Until then, breathe, breathe.

Be that I’m not so naive, to feel that anguish, pain, suffering, loneliness, anxiety should be washed away with the thoughts of anti-nihilistic messages of becoming, we will all feel and have the worst days throughout the courses of our lives. The question becomes, to what degree?

We are all psychotic when we have inner dialogue with ourselves, making jokes or laughing inside our heads. But the psychosis, is to what degree? Depression, we all have felt sad or depressed at points to where we can’t even get out of bed due to heart ache and isolation tends to soothe the pain temporarily. The question is to to what degree are we depressed? For this observation being so very true to the human condition, we are all prone to expect a life of anguish and strife. Not only with the ones around you, but ultimately with yourself. You must pull up your anchor and sail into uncharted seas, live dangerously and stray away from looking at life through the lens of the photographer, become the photographer. Be not the brush that meets the painter's canvas, be the painter. Break from your dull pale shell, become what you hope to be. If you may fall short know that it was all in good cause. The broken homes, the hyper-religious parents, the strung out friends all add the the lengthy list that becomes either your demise or your prosperity. To feel anguish is too be what we call human. But to understand the structure and meaning behind the anguish is the spark that makes you different. To feed off that is too be a God in your own right. To be is to become, and to not become is to be content.

Burn your self help books, torch them and brush away the ashes as does the adventurer when he puts out his fire in the morning and makes way for the peak. Be the one who does for themselves, not for others. Don’t give your self “10 ways to live your life” overcome your limitations. If you parish, parish on the side of the mountain with the banner in hand that reads “Excelsior!” You are all you need, the sooner you accept that, the easier it will be to die.

~Hyperion~