Minimalism and maximalism are not virtues on their own but rather contingent on the ends they serve.
Efface not the self, abnegate the self.
Plant the seed in new soil, a new climate.
It is fine for communication to just cross the threshold of comprehension.
The obligation to swing the axe is not annulled by the existence of oppression, constrictions, and the mighty anger of the world’s wrath.
The fire has been put out, dear son, the clouds wept at the funeral, and now the rites of ascension may begin, let me adorn you with your white tunic.
When the words crumble, syntax fractures, and the cadence turns cacophonous, know that you may be at the edge of the world — what awaits, a descent into an abyss or a flight to the moon?
Must one say A—B—C, and not C—B—A, or may yet C.1—B.2—A.3?
Whale bones on the beach, curving in the sand, shall we make of them a home?
This beat you hear in your ear, my bard, listen to it well — ask of it what it demands from you, can you follow? Move right with it lest you be cast outside time.
Place a finger on your pulse, find the beat that shall direct you to your beckoning.
Useless, these are the screams I heard, but of use is the cripple, the broken leg is better at dilating the pupil than the whole.
On this time you gave me, my child, shall I charge you for being seen? Your two eyes are the sun and the moon, burning-cold love.
Be mindful lest you may begin to imagine that what happens to you is what you are doing.
Fractures are compatible with ruin, but in the midst of a burning new sky, what may one make of the cracks, scars, and wounds?
Nothing may harm the wound more than the balm.
And while you may come to detest the symbols, do not desecrate the function they may serve for someone other than yourself.
When you were left abandoned in a cosmos unknown to you, in which you could not even breathe, as you gasped for air, wriggling like a snake lost in the whims of gravity, did they not tell you of their grand adventures, their conquests on Earth?
If it is wished for this body to be colonized, then so be it — if it is written for the limbs to obey Arminius or Flavus, there shall be no complaints registered with the praetors.
Must this travesty of thinking within the curves of this cave haunt you in eternity, this haunting of Caesar — but when Cincinnatus threw you a line whilst you drowned, you gave your hand instead to Sulla’s tether — do not wilt in this confoundment, for errancy is better than seizure.
Bridges tear through the pages, ladder stacked onto ladder, on which climbs the wolf, tamed through decades of wear, in search of meat not existent in his own world.
An escape from the furnace, a chance to sow seeds, of new plants and trees by the white cliff wherein the sea spray washes clean your ashen eyes.
When you come upon the frontier, the boundary where home becomes shrouded in haze, worry not of its destruction, but rather the next step into newness.
The iterative invention of the image radically altered the purpose and reception of speech and words in gradations: no longer was the man-making friction of discovering the world a necessity.
The crescent makes accretions tolerable — the symbols, carvings, and marks — the runes and inscriptions — all made simple — an anchor — solid ground — all the more valuable in days of a harsh summer — a simple communion of two sentences that seams together sense and madness — a love made clement — the mercy of the seventh century.
Better alone with God and the Prophet, peace and blessing upon him, than with strange objects of perception that can twist the mechanical sieve through which all light and darkness is processed and amalgamated into meaning — the warmth of this acceptance triumphs over any supposed unqualified light — “and no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.”
The mundane is a blessing — exaggerations past the mean are omens of trouble.
There is some use for a basic blanket of superficial modesty, not in the sense of a veneer, but a thinly braided cover that prevents the visibility of the grotesque, and so while the grotesque may exist, it cannot be lauded, marketed, or celebrated, and that in itself is a minor blessing as one seeks to spear down even the hidden manifestations of evil — there still remains a healthy disregard for the petty and depraved ploys of the devil.
The mosque never turned purple even in its most ornate expression — a minor blessing — a shield against the claustrophobic accumulation of images that become symbols that become grossly misunderstood by men.
Often now, God alerts us to the presence of the demonic through premonitions and brief shudders, a particular kind of which is called death’s remembrance in certain parlance. Sometimes, He is kind to indicate and disclose the demonic lurking in cultural symbols: art, film, and song — even in the placement of bricks; as the devil prefers to conceal himself in certain cloaks, he has to, for his own success, ensure that such cloaks are dispersed widely enough for them to become ordinary. Here, God is yet kind in producing in the yet innocent body visceral reactions to what it believes to be evil — and to cultivate the sensitivity of those reactions even further is piety, while to let them degrade is a step towards waywardness. And when the body malfunctions in its ability to discern, the word of God emerges as a standard of calibration — another mercy for when the devil himself seeks to induce in the body whispers and obsessions.
The grandfather and grandmother who pass away now were born before the age of information and their piety was, in large parts, rooted in simplicity — not in elaborate self and myth-making exercises, and in that, they were under the auspices of divine protection — now, the seal of time past is broken, and the new people strive to grasp at God in a world constituted by parts that have manifested as discrete complexities.
Does one wage war with the devils or simply ignore them? Both, but the organizing relation is important: one wages war through an attention solely committed towards God so that the caprice of these wretched beings is rendered invisible just by virtue of frame, and hence, one is not particularly aware of being at war because setting one’s gaze unto the Lord habituates one to being in His eternal peace.
Without writing about the images of the now in the form of images themselves, one is unable to ring the bells, but high up in the tower, one must always be ready to jump into the hay of God’s basic promise lest one be seduced by one’s own canvases.
Logical arguments for God are plenty, so are intuitive arguments for God, although logic and intuition being discrete are volitional decisions — within the latter, fear, too, is proof of God — for when fear strikes refuge is instinctively sought in the Lord in even some of the most God-defiant men — fear, then, is a mercy, too — a convulsive beckoning towards the Master — an iron hook into the heart.
The Prophet, the entirety of all peace and blessings that this world may witness be upon him and his progeny: he did not merely choose a poverty of the bowl, rather he also chose a poverty of being itself — he did not decorate himself in ornate symbols of speech or text — he was so truly a man, a man, that even his fear on the night of his beginning, was a fear pure of alterities — a true beckoning questioned to be madness — how utterly beautiful was the lack of pretense — world-making.
Outward profession of faith taken to be an issue of the law for a long time an issue of the law, as a mere sufficiency of belief regardless of one’s inner states, all the while disregarding the epistemic difference between hypocrisy and fractured faith, both expressing as a conflict between the inwards and the outwards with the vital difference of the latter being a blessing, the former a curse — the former being an allowance from God to submit to the word despite the fractures in the soul, the latter an effusion of the very same corruptions — similar internal mechanics, different emanations.
If one is watchful over the passage of time that is one’s life, there is a singular moment in time, not an instance of time, rather a small spread moment, wherein one can feel one’s life being at the numerical midway point of one’s life — it is a palpable intuition marked primarily by an overwhelming sense of child-ness and elderliness coalesced, with a resultant sense of life and death in perfect measure. This midway is not the half of the sum of one’s total years, rather it is the dwelling in a moment that is marked, through contingencies and inspirations, as the threshold crossing of one’s life — this is a minor blessing for it represents a phenomenon of beckoning one towards the strangeness of being alive in material world, with the ability to think and feel.
For two millennia men were haunted by the task of weighing the merits of reason and intuition, logic and taste, as discrete domains of knowledge, burdened by the weighty boulders of the greats, not allowing themselves to feel the alchemy of both caressed together into a gentle gaze we call attention, and those who sought to do so were hanged in their infancy.
Being in debt to the glob of the past over the present second is an affront to Godliness.