“If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”

“According to Milan Kundera, “being” is full of “unbearable lightness” because each of us has only one life to live: “Einmal ist Keinmal” (”once is never”, i.e., “what happened once might as well have never happened at all”). Therefore, each life is ultimately insignificant; every decision ultimately does not matter. Since decisions do not matter, they are “light”: they do not tie us down. But at the same time, the insignificance of our decisions - our lives, or being - is unbearable. Hence, “the unbearable lightness of being.” (quote from Wikipedia)

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." ~Ecclesiastes 1:9

"For time is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies are finite.... Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations that have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again.... And thus it will happen one day that a man will be born again, just like me, and a woman will be born, just like Mary." ~ Heinrich Heine

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in 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; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Eternal recurrence - a finite number of events infinitely recurring again and again in infinite time, like games of chess, that, played one after another forever, eventually will repeat any game ever played.

The world is an eternal process of coming to be and passing away, where origin and end of the process seem to become fleeting vanishing points.When there is no final point, no destination, eventually every combination of matter and energy will be realized and repeated and infinite number of times - an escheresque return, a neverending groundhog day.

If a past event is experienced as a future one, it is recognized as something we already know, as something we have experienced before, and therefore, as a repetition.

Every recognition is a remembering - and repetition and memory are both the same movement, just into different directions; for what is remembered, has been and is repeated backwards, whereas actual repitition remembers in forward direction.

Only what we remember can we identify, and only what we recognize can we name and thus make unique.

"Einmal is keinmal", once is never, if the 'once' comes into its true being through repetition only, if it becomes what it should be only by means of recurrence (and the english language seems to see it that way - in english, you do not "cognize", but you "re-cognize"... the repetition is in the word already).

Once is never, is just a draft, nameless and without reference, like a ray of light without reflection, like a sound with nothing to resonate in, not seen, not heard, not recognized - and therefore, equal to non-existent, to never-been?

Or is "einmal", once, the source, the beginning from where all possible repetitions take their origin?The 'once' that holds all possible events within, all possible becomings that are actual, that are within the now, that are now?

"Une fois pour toutes", Deleuze says, "The paradoxicality of true repetition is that 'once' stands for 'all'".

Einmal ist alles. Once is all.

Once is what we experience, right now. Once is the moment. Each moment arises and perishes, and the perishing of a moment allows the next moment to arise. For the moment, there is no end. The perishing of a moment is not a final state. Moments do not end in time because they allow other moments to arise.

"The moment is immortal in which I produce return. For the sake of this moment I bear return." (Nietzsche's Notebooks)

The eternal return is the vertigo that causes the subject, the event, the now to go around and around for innumerable times in series of infinite vibrations of being: all these vibrations reverberating, until the consonance of this same instant, in which these dissonances are reabsorbed anew, is re-established.

beginning

drink winter wine
warm your hearth fire and
embrace your
shivering being

can you hear the stars
in the ice crystals
whispering of the living spirits
deep down in the earth?

can you feel the longing
in the low-sun horizon
guarding the eye
upwards to fire
healing and holy?

does not a hint
of glowing sparks
sound forth beneath
winter-hardened bark?

this is the beginning
this is the release of
the frozen form

spread your wings widely
over the declining arch
of the dying year

exhale your seed of light
breathe it and grow it
close to you

the wondrous moment in between....

inside your dream
you awaken
to give rise to
timeless
drownings
inside floods of
ancient
glow

in a dance
of warm winds
and dark soft voices

in the center of a
sphere without perimeter
you
then create
flaming rivers
nile songs thick
with ancient honey
its silent refrain exploding
as firefalls spin

your heart beats into existence
the rapture of drunken dreams
the wild meeting of breaths:

the ur-seed of wisdom
the well of light

universes you give birth to
and are born from

October

this buzzing silence

holding its breath - sweet

the arvid murmur of

last skythes

smoke wed to glow

coupling with the

dying sun that perfects

the sleep of clouds

the undevoured light

ebbs to sustenance

in the fissures

of decaying dreams

embering to the lip

of a nomadic sky: earth

from which my voice

escapes

eyes sleep in soil

fruit ripens

in the vacant lots

of solstice

heat recedes

light escapes

through the interval

piano and accordion

life is like a piano: what you get out of it depends on how you play it.



time is an accordion: expanding and contracting while the wind of change sings on its reeds.

...if life is a piano, and time is an accordion (and a cello is passion, and a clarinet is emotion, and a guitar is thought, and a drum is instinct), then the human voice must surely be our own jubilating consciousness within the great symphony of existence....

the frozen sea within

jökulsárlón, glacier lake south of vatnajökull glacier, iceland, 1990. pic taken from a paper photograph.

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." ~ Franz Kafka

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