Insanity is not a sign of a broken mind – it is a side effect of normal brain function in combination with collective cultural delusions. Our brains normally function by fitting reality into the framework of our predictions. Our cultures constitute a collective framework of assumptions underlying those predictions. If our predictions override reality in a way that differs from everyone else’s, it constitutes madness.
The only way to achieve the impossible is to start doing it. You may not achieve it that way, but there is no other way to achieve it.
Arrow slits have to be narrow to protect the defenders of the castle.
Any wider and they will be exposed to dangers from outside.
Being narrow is what they are for.
I am a person who…
I see the world through the arrow slit of my self-definition.
Relevant images and metaphors draw my eye.
A living wood turns into Golgotha
with dead trees supporting crucifixions.
The fewer the parameters – the more important they become.
If all I know about myself is that I am a Christian,
I would be willing to die for it.
Or kill for it.
After all,
arrow slits are
for shooting out of.
As imarets
transform to minarets,
and rigid ideologies prevail –
states fail.
Seville Cathedral used to house Christian and Muslim worshippers side-by-side.
After the inquisition took power, the Muslim part was appropriated and built over with Christian symbology.
You can still see the interface. It is cracking.
A mass of yellow stone
floating in the blue
of the clear, brilliant sky above
and the turbulent Guadalquivir below –
its enormous bulk
made weightless by the context.
Ottoman Cordoba was a univer-city,
a unverse with a small “u”.
A mess of cultures,
sweaty cross-fertilization –
exciting,
faintly indecent,
infinitly productive.
Not the golden mean of Aristotle,
not the measured path of restraint –
contorted co-mingling,
intertwined but not melded.
The way of Socrates –
clear contradiction that is growth
made stone.
The beach is a special place, a narrow path
between heights and depths, created by water.
Precipitous cliffs on the right – concrete, huge, looming
their weight makes them feel acute and real, like pain.
It’s often said that life is pain – it is,
but lasting pain is only an illusion
created by the myth of lasting self.
But so too is happiness – same logic
applies.
Avoiding one and chasing after other –
a looser’s game.
You stop the chase and acquiesce to pain.
It lays quiescent
and underpins your joy.
Enormous sea on the left – deep, silent, inchoate,
seamlessly transforming into sky.
Three container ships in undifferentiated sea-sky,
like ducks over the fireplace.
Familiar, ridiculous and safe,
creating anchor point
for frightened gaze
that’s lost in space and finding you in time –
the time of progress.
So you progress –
you walk along the beach,
twixt depths and heights,
abandon and despair,
between deficiency and excess,
the middle way, the golden mean of Greeks.
Temerity-timidity
not much
to choose between –
one consonant, two vowels.
The trick is not to chose or compromise
but merely to tread between the two,
not enter the extremes,
keep in the middle,
create the path anew with every move.
What you really need is a thin line of firm sand,
between loose dry and slippery wet,
easier to walk on.
Someone to hold by the hand,
to not have to look down for solid footing,
to see all that beauty.
Extremes are always ugly,
beauty is
in golden mean,
in-sink
and in-between,
a pattern in complexity, a path
that unifies variety and us.
First you figure out who you are not;
then you figure out who you are;
finally, you figure out you are not who.
