In Bliss

There are moments when I have it all…

Silent, gentle psychoses  –

Beautiful stories about dreams of roses…

Moments when I have it all.

 

Here are moments when I have it all…

Life ends with a string of words

A song from then on… towards…

Moments when I have it all.

George Bacovia, In fericire

The Victory of Thought

Philosophy is the effort to light, the aspiration to last or supreme clarity because it is heading towards generalizing notions through which science and consciousness, theory and practice, world and life are unified or totalized.

Philosophy is not just an analytical research of fundamental notions or principles, but it is also the most lacking bias or predetermination research.

“What abstraction and removal of life and concrete !”, it will be said. On the contrary, we have the right to say that we are closest to life. I believe that the successful act, the winning action knows to combine the attachment and detachment of the real, the concrete attention and the passion for the sensitive things.

Our ability to dethrone ourselves from reality, to rise above the concrete allows us to create an “internal immunity” that shelters us from the blows of reality and of disappointment and failure.

Exclusive attachment of real, slavery for sensitive-material data are a mortal danger for active life and lead to exhaustion of interest in things, to tired of attention, to disgust for reality and, ultimately, to despair or, more seriously, to absorbtion in small but imperative realities until brutalization and fall below human level.

To avoid this fall man needs a revival, a refreshment of powers, a recharge of depleted or degraded energies in his struggle with physical realities. Except for the use of physiological sleep, most people get this energy recharge through the so-called “fun” of all kinds where art takes a special place.

But the fun is ephemeral, and by accumulation leads to annoyance of the will and spiritual imbalance. A safer way opens through which we can free ourselves from the spell of reality and obtain a lasting immunity: it is the will to rise over the parts and reach the springs of the world, to Unity and Totality. The orientation towards Unity and Totality is the pathos of philosophy, the dream of supreme clarity…

In the calculation of the conjuncture, the one who struggles for the triumph of an idea must take into account the possibility of defeat, immunizing himself against failure and discovering a last refuge.

“The thought was victorious”, the chronicler said. The victory of thought often comes after the defeat of the thinker or after a long and systematic ignorance of his efforts. The triumph of the idea is often paid by the martyrdom of its thinker.

from Mircea Florian, Misticism și credință

Fagged

Darling, I came again…

But today I barely go  –

Open the piano and play to me

A song for the dead.

.

And if I fall on carpets

In the sad, silent salon, –

You still play, darling,

Slowly, monotonously.

 

It’s a really sick century,

I’m not surprised I’m sick too;

Open the piano and sing to me

So that I fall into delusion.

George Bacovia, Trudit

translated from Romanian by Marcel Rus

Traveling to Impossible

It was an indefinite day of March or April and I went unsteadily to the boyar’s palace. Here, in a room covered with wainscoting, the teacher was waiting for me. He has started a  strange lecture on impossible. It was the turn of the utopian. While I was going to the meeting place I was wondering if it was a farce of my original friend.

 Starting from almost any word, a spiral can be lifted and rounded a thought. But the impossible, being so dry and devoid of sap, remains a no-body notion. Imagination doesn’t even try to make it a profile. In our rushed century, who has time to meditate on such a non-substantial term ?

The question was rhetorically. Even in our fast-growing world, thousands of creators give life daily to a few specimens of impossible in the form of books, movies, plays and TV productions, and millions of people demand and consume the essence of impossible in all aspects in which it is offered. In the past, fleeing for chimeras, as bold as in our modern age, created Olympus and passed the Styx.

Flee in search of the impossible is somehow a general human trait ? A saying said nothing was worth doing except the impossible. Utopian applauds. He is ready for any concession: if the impossible cannot be reached, it must at least be imagined.

The notion of uncertainty indicates the fragility of the boundary between possible and impossible, giving us a picture of the relativity of our knowledge. Getting here, we are looking for the words: “Under certain conditions it is possible…”. The subjective factor that oscillates the status of any concept finds here a vast area of influence.

The unlikely is the uncertainty of the impossible. Situations favorable to the manifestation of phenomena excluded by known laws may be built, but that could be justified by laws that are still unknown.

Remains impossible. It is not an empty space and even less an amorphous space. The solutions that fit here contradict everything that is known, seem fancy, chimeric, absurd. It is known that there is a fantasy literature, the chimeras could never be removed from art, and the term absurd defines today a well-defined literary category.

The history of science also reminds us that many hypotheses first appeared in the area of impossible before they were fixed in the space of great certainty.

from Horia Arama, Insulele fericite

ULYSSES

As I sit alone in the darkness of the night,

Listening to that song coming from the sea,

A nostalgic longing of journey comes to me

Wrapping me like a whirlwind, raising me up

And take me away, away…

 

Oh, since then I have been looking for the way home,

Without recognizing it, finding it anymore…

Mircea M. Pop, Ulysse

translated from Romanian by Marcel Rus

 

Waiting in Memories

Now I’m waiting, what should I do ? Of course, I’ll work further. However, I don’t say that what I write now is just as well, as full of life as it was when I was in the blossom of power when my head was filled with ideas like the waters of a spring river.

Because I’m a creature that lives the thoughts – why do I say “creature” and not “man” ? – I’ll continue, while waiting, to do what I do. I’ll console myself with good wines and food, but not to drunkenness or saturation, make sure to keep my old friends, those who have stayed my friends.

Do you now think I told you the happenings of my life ? I just gave you news of events in my life as I did best.

Life is made up of passing events that touch our nerves and organs of perception, and which man, whatever he strives, cannot integrate them in his own evolution. The work of a painter may well be closer to the result of an intense creative hour. Jackson Pollock had the ability to show the ecstasy as it cannot be expressed in words. Van Gogh was able to capture the beautiful, indescribable moments of falling into madness…

Rimbaud is the only poet who has brought the word so high that he could catch, movingly, the meanings of the incandescent moments of existence. And there is also Hart Crane. The two poets lit a fire that burned during their lifetime. And perhaps we, the people who write, can truly mediate for you the whole truth of our ego, within the limits of our books, by sacrificing us.

from Tennesse Williams, Memories  – adaptation

From Times

It’s cold, winter…

I want to think about my desolate years –

I don’t expect anyone anymore,

No hope.

No one is free…

I want to think about my desolate years  –

Close anywhere,

Close the door, it’s cold, winter.

George Bacovia, Din Vremuri

translated from Romanian by Marcel Rus

Cause and Effect

The course of nature, although it is supposed to be perfectly regular, yet it does not appear to us so, and many events are unsafe and many more disappoint our expectations.

When we look around for the outer objects and consider the action of the causes, we are never able to discover any necessary force or connection, any quality that combines the effect to the cause, making it one of the infallible consequence of the other, considering only one case.

We just find that in reality the effect comes after the cause. The momentum of a billiard ball is followed by the second ball. This is all that appears to our outer senses.

We can see that this influence, just like all other natural events, can only be known through experience and can never be predicted on the basis of any energy or force that would bind it to effect and make the last infallible consequence of the first.

The movement of our body follows the command of our will and we are aware of it every moment. But as to the means by which this operation is performed or the energy through which the will performs such an extraordinary operation, we are so far away from being directly aware that they will always escape our most thorough research.

So, first of all,  is there any more mysterious principle in the whole nature than the union of soul and body by which the supposed spiritual substance has such an influence on the material one that the most subtle thought is capable of moving the grossest matter ?

If we had the power that by a mysterious desire to move the mountains or control the planets in their orbits, such an immense power would be no more extraordinary and far beyond our power of understanding.

from David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Midnight

The leaves have started now

A lazy, pathetic dance !

And I cry, and my cry in the night

Is the brother of the outside osier.

 

Midnight is approaching slowly,

And the dance of leaves is heard,

I run from room to room

When satanic hour rings.

George Bacovia, Miezul noptii

translated from Romanian by Marcel Rus

Self-Conceit

A homeless man in the suburbs of Madrid begged in a noble manner; a pedestrian tells him: “Aren’t you ashamed to practice such an infamous profession, although you could work ?”

“Sir,” answered the beggar, “I asked you for money, not for advice”; then he turned his back, preserving all his Castilian dignity.

This homeless man was proud, and his vanity felt wounded for a trifle. He begged because of self-love, and he doesn’t stand to be reprimanded because of the same kind of self-love.

A missionary traveling in India met a fakir naked as a monkey, loaded with chains and  lying on the ground, and who was whipped for the sins of his Indian countrymen, instead receiving a few coins. “How self-sacrifice !”, the spectators said. “What self-sacrifice of myself ?”, replied the fakir. “Now find that I’m beaten in this world only to beat you in the other world where you will be horses and I ride”.

Those who said self-conceit was the base of all our feelings and all our actions, they were right in India, in Spain and throughout the inhabited earth; and how we don’t write to prove to people that they had faces, so there is no need to prove them they had self-conceit.

This self-conceit is the tool of our conversations; it is similar to the species perpetuation tool: it is necessary, we love it, it enjoy us, but we have to hide it.

from Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique