It's ironic, how to efface yourself you need God through other people. It's paradoxical, how you need to look inward, inward, deeper and deeper, and then suddenly you're on the outside, with a bright sun shining on other people's faces, and you find yourself without your own shadow. Suddenly you crave to be replaced by a concern for something foreign to yourself, oh, but you're shaking and scared as well. You know being alive means being vulnerable, so painfully, tearfully, vulnerable. And you want to take things back every moment, and say, no I don't want this commitment, this concern, 'what do I care about the him or the her who doesn't even care to say thank you.' And what you really mean is you've exposed yourself too much, and now the beads of sweat are starting to trickle, and you're anticipating the sound of laughter. To bare a heart and make it open to hurt, that is the cost of the authentic.

But see, what is the reward? The reward has been turned inside out like a sock. The reward is losing your life. "But I don't understand! Or waitaminute, rather I do! It's simple enough, eh? You lose your life in this one to gain an even better one. It's a bargain! It's an appeal to human shrewdness." But no, I think I'd rather say no. I think it's not that at all. The logic of the statement appeals to selfish human faculty, but there is something that only the mystics will ever catch. The reason why you need to efface yourself is because there is something inexplicable, a constant exploding light, so powerful and magnificent, that it can disintegrate the soul into tiny bits. And there is a shockwave, then the elements melt, then there is a lightwave, and the eyes lapse into purest whiteness. There is a constant looming presence of something, something here, that had to be revealed through the radical and absurd Cross just to give an inkling. We are so tired of small gods, when the real God is one who breakssvn rrff dddownn and rendersrenders uttttterly speechless----

Why the giving? Why the self-effacing? Why the washing of feet? Because the more of this the closer you are to the truth of a Shekinah all-consuming. Because in some things the Zen Buddhists have a clearer picture, except they never go all the way. They stop at the 'nothing', when you see you have to push past the zero, into the negative, and then, negative infinity, and then, the irrational, and then, to the place where we have yet no symbol for. That is what the real God can inspire in the twinkle of an eye. And how it makes me smile, and smile, and smile, like a child in awe of a mystery explained in such clear terms, of being a cheerful giver, of loving your brother.

It is always a good feeling to find out that your cat is still alive. It's a warm, and furry kind of relief at hearing the familiar meow, and then you know everything's alright in the world. It looks like our cat took his longest forced vacation yet, which he does every time our dog gives birth and becomes dangerously protective. Well we thought he'd never come back, which wasn't only an emotional concern but also a very hygienic one: rats have been running rampant like they owned the place. You can't imagine how relieved we were to hear him come back, immediately offering him a whole piece of chicken and a can of sardines.

Our cat is a frail, and slightly-built cat, with patches of gray stripes on white. He is small and sickly, and you often catch him sneezing from his own fur. His health is due to the fact that he never got enough of his mother's milk. My dad found him on a rainy afternoon on our doorstep as an orphaned kitten, and then my threw him over to the vacant lot for fear of our dogs. However, we suspect that our mother dog took pity on the poor thing and carried him back, and so we've kept him ever since. In due time he'd also learn some dog traits like lying on his back and expecting a belly scratch.

I guess I write this entry because I remember a certain nostalgic scene where I really loved my cat. It was past midnight. There had been a power failure the whole day and everything was pitch black except for a waning candle on the table. Everyone else was asleep, and you could easily hear the ticking of the clock on the wall. For some reason I was reading St. Augustine's Confessions in that infamous translation by a Mr. Pine-Coffin. And then I felt as if my life in modernity suddenly vanished, and I was a reluctant monk in some dark and damp cloister. The candle was melting, and the dark was thick and suffocating. There was a claustrophobic fear of lives spent whiling the nights away over old books in dim candlelight, lives of endless and fruitless study.

But then, as if to reassure me and make me feel safe my cat leapt on the chair right beside me and rubbed close. As I stroked that slender head and felt his affectionate purrs warm the air, as I touched his body and ran my fingers through his fur, I knew then that there will never be real philosophic wisdom without a cat. The only worthwhile approach to philosophy is closing your eyes like a cat and purring.

Waaaaaaaah! I just.. sat.. through.. sixteen hours of Heroes, the entire first season. Now I can really understand what all the hype was about. I thought it was pretty good, it kept me and my brother glued to the screen until the sun came up, then he had to go to school, and I, unsuspecting victim that I was, stayed through eight more hours on my own. I had no idea it was that long. We started around 10pm and already 2pm by my watch. I thought it had a really well-crafted plot, very well thought out, weaved like an absolute page-turner. Not perfect, but I won't dwell on all the things I'd change if I could (I thought the DL/Niki angle was quite unnecessary). I really liked the main protagonists though, like Hiro and the Petrelli brothers. It's really new for me to see three-dimensional, fleshed out characters in a superhero setting, with their issues and insecurities and all that other stuff. Oh, and I thought the guy who played Mohinder Suresh was a real find. Really impressive Indian-English diction. Heh.

So I guess I'll be watching the second season as well! But now I have to go to sleep!

Been gone a while. Another bout of precious, precious, humbling. False platforms taken away, brotherly sandpaper applied on the ego. Pride is a really tricky devil. I imagine it something like a giant slimy eel, slipping through your arms and then before you know it it's nestled in them again. You'd like to think you're humble now. Oh, but you sound so proud about it. I guess you're beginning to think you're more humble than the next guy. Pride is a revolving dinner table, have your fill of this so you can taste a slightly varied dish. Every lapse of love becomes a sign. The person you find so hard to like, the person you want to bring low, becomes the clearest mirror. You'd like to be vocal, tell them where they can 'work it out', take out the speck, then the light blinds you right back and then you see yourself. And then you cringe. In the confusion the criticisms diffuse into silence, into a sublime murmuring with God. The genuine humility is the unspoken: birthed in the quiet, in the calm. "Make me a servant, humble and meek".

If God was not as high as the heavens, and Christ not down on the earth like blood spilled on the ground, where would I be? Floating listlessly in my own self, the excessively cryptic, the aesthetic, the nil. Unable to cry, unable to care. They call it a negative star, the negative mass, the implosion. But in this love that does not spare the rod I'm forced to crumple, forced to kneel, because the Light frightens me into my place, and the cross convicts me with shame. It says, it is not whether you feel like loving your brother, it is the "Thou Shalt". This is the ways things are, the communion, the Oneness with everything that breathes. Forget yourself in sweet forgetting.

Lesson number one is it is very dangerous, and very unwise, to poeticize the erotic. What do we mean? We mean all these tendencies to proclaim and shout to the world your love for the him or the her, a love above all things, with the most dizzying expressions, with blushing poetry. This is the wine and drink of the poets who try and squeeze the grape of human love for infinity, but only get ferment and later nausea. If you love somebody then love her with the sharpest focus, love her in a private language that only the two of you can understand. Keep it hidden from view, like the sacred art of lovemaking. For goodness sakes don’t write a collection of poems and publish it, but scrawl them on paper, give it to her, and then forget them forever. Let all your gushing expressions be kept in her soul alone. Don't let anyone else in on how much you love her except a confiding God, and perhaps several mute angels. Let every bit and piece of inspiration not be wasted on an audience but let it pierce her for all its worth, like a strong, concentrated beam of light. But why, you ask? Because this love is the human, the ever-moving, the time-bound. Every attempt to capture and crystallize it is a self-deception. You say you love her this much, you wrap your emotions in a newly devised metaphor, and then? And then keep it alive in time, let it ring like a note in a progressing piece, let her hear it and resonate, but also let it fade away. But I know what you want, you want to establish it, to turn it into a work of art for all the world to gape at. You want to write this love for the benefit of eyes not yours and not your beloved’s, a sort of sneak peek, a free exhibition. And then you go ahead and excuse yourself from loving her and make love to the world. Your poetry deteriorates into pride, a pride in having tasted what others keep dreaming and praying for, a pride in orchestrated, carefully crafted happiness, a pride in a lie.

But see, this erotic love for her is a game we used to play as children. If you stand still for a minute, or if you turn your head to stare at the other players, then you will let her whisk past the chalk line and then you will lose. Oh you may still keep her in a superficial sense, but you lose her in a deeper, more grievous sense, one that meant a clandestine kind of trust. The only poetry worthwhile in this love is the unspoken, the quick and abrupt movements that would keep her where she is, always right before you, and always moving. You are perceptive to every tiny motion, the direction of her eyes, the slight breathing of her chest, the play of her feet. She moves one way and then you react and block her path. You feign an opening and then you almost catch her. It is a love that demands the utmost concentration. And if you play it right you will not delude yourself and the world and pretend this love for her is infinite and timeless, something engraved in gold. No, it is caught in life, played only by both of you, and it is not something anyone else should partake in. Unless of course you have confused two different loves for each other.

Lesson number two is that the erotic is not the infinite. It is a misdirection to look for true love everlasting in another human being, in the face that grows old and the heart that can turn. But nevertheless we insist. That is why in the peak of emotion, after that wonderful date, after that wonderful kiss, you just want to slice time and put in on paper, and then you want to hang it for all to see. You want things in your life to smell of the infinite, the forever, the undying. And the infinite is something you want everyone to worship. But unfortunately you become just another idol maker. You take this other human being and then carve her out, deck her with gems and golden bells, and then ask other people to bow. But the erotic is not the infinite. No, if you infinitize your love for the woman you will only lose the woman. If you think to substitute your love for a woman for the void in your heart where you ought to have found the love of God, then you commit the fault of all useless and tragic poets, who cared more about their fake testimonies then the tears of the women they supposedly loved.

Little robot floats steadily through space. There is no sound, only distant pixels of light up and beneath, around and around. And in the black canvas he has his own light, a little yellow blinking signal. He floats slowly like a forgotten asteroid, and as the days pass it feels as if he hardly moves any distance. Where is our little robot headed, we wonder? He conserves his energy, in the darkness all his systems are shut down and he is asleep. He drifts in the speckled blackness of space, like a body floating on the sea, with the light on his forehead blinking, blinking. Here and there tiny stars of varied colors tremble in their places.

"Little robot, are you still there?" He has passed beyond the reach of communication. There is a faint voice in space, an inaudible signal, that fades into a thread and is no more. It is lost in the waves of light of the stars, garbled in the stream of energy in the darkness. He has lost his line to home. In his sleep, in his electric dreams, we imagine him shedding a tear.

Countless years pass, a thousand, maybe even more. Through it all he drifts in rotating slumber. As he passes beneath the eaves of the pale stars the lights and shadows play tricks on his face. A thousand moments make him gloomy and sad, and a thousand more make him smile. But through it all his eyes are closed, and the blinking light slowly wanes.

In time he approaches a bright rainbow cluster, an ancient birthplace of stars. In its throbbing belly the elements collide and compress to give birth to baby stars. You can almost hear the churning, the groaning, and shrieks of delivery. Giant sprays of light shoot through space, longer and wider than a million orbits. Sometimes however the cradle gives birth to angels. And as our little robot passes close to the massive cloud a glowing baby angel carefully drifts beside him. "You are so far from home, little robot, where are you off to?" His light blinks. "Oh, I know where you are off to, it is a far place but it is also very beautiful. I wish I could go with you there, but it is not yet my time." His light blinks sadly. "Yes, maybe when you finally reach it, you'll find your new home." With that she gives him a parting kiss on the cold forehead, and then glides away.

 

Show me any other philosopher who can write something like “The Diary of the Seducer” by Kierkegaard and I’ll be damned. It is impossible to write anything this sustained, built over this much pathos, which wears a horrible and frightening façade to express a deep and tender hurt. As a secret message to the one you love, to tell her everything that you are not, it borders on the fanatic. We are introduced to the Seducer, who is not a seducer in the normal, paltry sense of the word. He is highly developed beyond the merely physical or the sentimental, light years beyond the childish Casanova or Don Juan. He is not after possession of the body, but the sweet, evanescent smell of infinity. Because he understands the woman more profoundly than all worldly seducers ever can. The woman is like Nature, the flower blooming, the ray of light streaking, the being which is not for itself but for something other than itself. The purity and virginity which is real only in relation to another. She is a vision of the formless infinite, blossoming in a moment. In her lies all the mysteries of love which cannot be put into words, the ineffable, the sigh, the silence, the separation which translates into presence. She is the inexhaustible spring in the abstract, which shimmers and disappears in reality’s mirage. “And from this it can be explained why, when God created Eve, He caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam; for woman is the dream of man.”

But our seducer is the veritable “aesthete”, and he claims for himself the higher calling. From the woman we wants to lure out the power of the erotic, that which was always inside from the very beginning but which must be skillfully brought out lest it degenerate into the worldly and the mundane. He wants to draw out love, not the love of convention but that feminine love which is a golden as spring and fiery as a tempest. It is the power of every woman to smite and overwhelm, and yet also at the same time to also give all and be overwhelmed. And after the sacred beautiful has been brought out, after the woman is in the pitch of a passion that was always hers, then the flicker is left alone and he moves on to the next. When the match is struck it ignites and blazes then slowly wanes, but he will not stay to see it die. The seducer is not in love with any particular woman but with the ideal woman, formed from the harmonized reflections of all young girls, that spectacle which he claims Heaven itself would be envious of. He loves but does not know how to love. He brings out love from the woman for the sake of taste. He lives in the present without a future.

“Johannes!
There was a rich man, he had great herds, and many cattle, small and great; there was a poor little maiden, she had only a single lamb, which ate from her hand and drank of her cup. You were the rich man, rich in all the glories of the earth; I was the poor maiden who had only her love. You took it; you rejoiced in it; then passion beckoned you, and you did sacrifice the little I possessed; of your own you would sacrifice nothing. There was a rich man who owned great herds, and many cattle great and small; there was a poor little maiden who had only her love.

===

As I was commuting home this afternoon I saw two rainbows overlapping in the sky, and a glaze of white stretching from both of them to the horizon. Did you know that if you stare long and hard at a rainbow it loses its colors and disappears? So with your life, so with your life.

===

I tried dropping in on the fraternity after a long disappearance, and before my disparaging remarks some self-criticism is required. I clammed up, I regressed. It feels like I cannot be who I am now if you drop me into situations of my past like throwing me into a pool. I fail to reach out, fail to smile, fail to humble myself. I become combative. I sneer. But why? Because in these boys trying hard to be men I see who I was, with all my insecurities, with my false securities. In a culture that espouses little more than green jokes and shallow minds. In attempts at discipline that trip and fail, because this is the phase where boys carrying metal pipes in a bag really only know how to play DotA, and where the principles are as vague as saying you have to be good. The history is a shadow that has no bearing, and brotherhood is as close knit as getting wasted together or a secret handshake.

But why am I so angry? Maybe it is because in truth I have discovered the importance of people as persons, as singular and outlined individuals, but the pretense of brotherhood blocks the way. Pretense, pretense, of connections that were never really there. Brotherhood built on a figment of the imagination. Organizations that believe in a single idea? Idea? The idea does not exist, only the people do. People are more important than any abstract idea, more than any abstract philosophy. People, not the the stimulations brought on by the word, but lives sympathetically touched, are second only to God.

===

Darn. They should really put warning labels on all those TV series compilations. I remember a time when the most you had to worry about was wasting a couple of hours on a movie. But this is going way too far. I think we watched 12 hours of Prison Break just yesterday, and we're on to the second season right now. Waaah!