Today, I don’t feel like moving, reading or doing. If I could, I would stop breathing and thus reach that absolute silence, no noise a total strike. Today I want to order my intestines to stop their peristaltic movements, I want to order my heart a total pause. The path to nothingness is a continuous and unstoppable movement. I’m not depressed, I just want a radical Sabbath.
Buddhists speak of that state of transcendence that they call Śūnyatā, emptiness. That emptiness is not nothingness, it is immensity, life as an infinity of possibilities, far from the bondage of matter.
A friend recently told me that life is what lies on the other side of my fears. He said it very calmly, after having spent a weekend of chemical hacking to reach nirvana.
Life seems like a mixture of repetition and absolutes to me. The orthodox when they do something seriously they do it 3 times, they say that the number three is the trinity, the absolute. Winning the gold, silver and bronze medal is something childish, that search for absolute truths, as Umbral said, is an adolescent nonsense. We are small waves of the universe, we mess up time because we don’t understand it, we invent love to intoxicate ourselves with infinity, sugar for our spirit. Goya reminds me of how Saturn devours his children, there is nothing absolute, nothing permanent.
Life seems to me a mixture of impermanence and games. We cannot take ourselves seriously, we are a sigh in nothingness. That nothing is indivisible and everything looks like everything else. Quantum physics discovered that the universe is a doubt between particles and waves. Benoit Mandelbrot discovered that everything looks like everything and explained it to us with drawings. Fractals are objects whose structure repeats itself at different scales. No matter whether we get closer or further away from the object, we always observe the same structure. Life is summed up in repetitive doubt. That is why we like exoticism, to break the routine of reality. Life is a woven cloth of memory with time and scattered days whose sunrises pretend to be a new beginning, thanks Borges.
All writing is a self-portrait. Perhaps this, as Baroja said, is nothing more than a set of lies that serve to shelter me from the coldness and sadness of life. But I always end up in Nietzsche and the slow arrow of beauty.
References
Umbral , read anything from him, but if you have to choose “Mortal and Pink”
Baroja, read anything from Baroja
Borges, read anything from Borges
The Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoit B Mandelbrot
Nietzsche, anything