Half Moon Epigrams
Whichever world you inhabit (whether awake or asleep, which, as any mirror maker knows, is, of course, purely a matter of where you are standing), it has been expecting you ever since, waiting explicitly for you to finally fulfill it (tip: study the color of the sky and you'll determine whether you are the world or the world is you),
patiently weaving its spiderweb around the very definitions of existence and of "you"
(we observe the universe aware that it knows us a lot better than we know it,
but nonetheless certain that what we are prevails over what it is),
or so it occurred to me in the tent while waiting for dawn to summon the answers
(i had asked "did the mute boundless darkness and the invisible winds that inhabit it allude to the primordial emptiness devoid of all meaning from which all meaning arose? does the flickering lamp that now fills the darkness hint at you?"),
painfully aware that in this world
the translucent stillness of the lake,
the gentle nodding of breeze-bathed pines,
the inexplicable anxiety of an eclipsed moon,
and the extravagant pomp of a neglected sunset
embody
the intoxicating loneliness of a marble ball slowly rolling down a sloping polished chessboard,
i.e. the route of the apocalypse winding its way through
our suddenly obsolete minds like through the rusting machinery of abandoned mines
(for now you can peel off the skin of the sky to expose its real color).
P.S.
It was entirely my fault that i lacked the answer: rummaging through my
memory (when only the sound of the creek was left to battle the silence of the stars), i oriented myself and rediscovered it (yes, i know: nonetheless
there is no sign
useful to explain the circumstances of your arrival, how did you get here in
the first place, facing a speechless sky whose only function is to reflect
your eyes, no logical reason for everything being the way it is and will be,
forever and ever, long after you will have stopped wondering whether you are awake or asleep).
Yosemite, 20 may 2012, 15:36
It is not pleasant
to be a footnote
that writes itself
at the bottom of a page
already so cluttered
with similar footnotes
in so many languages
that nobody will ever
read or quote;
but that's the one
and only means
that we have left
to remind ourselves
that we were there
and we contributed
to writing that book
that millions read
and nobody truly
understands.
P.S.
Silence is our shared
vocabulary; not the silence
of our voices, but the silence
of their answers.
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Half Moon Bay, 8 april 2012, 18:34
(A dialogue between an island of the Indian Ocean and a mountain of California's Sierra Nevada)
Ink spreading beyond the page,
sealing a thought never told
with a thought often retold,
calligraphy of soliloquies
rippling through the beaches and ravines and forests
of my treks,
thinking of the mountain from this island,
unsure of which one is the present and which
the memory (the I that i certainly was then
and
the I that i might be now share
the same brain but divided
by a neurological chasm),
on one hand the fisherman's rant
("an atoll is not a shelter, it is
a black hole on Earth, a gateway
to an underworld of prophetic magic,
the origin of everything, where
the earliest frothy streams
first gurgled the song
of life")
and on the other the hissing height
"you will never reach the real summit,
the eternal thought
that endlessly thinks itself,
but you cannot undo
your steps either,
because you are
the trail you take,
the granite dirt, the knotty roots,
the vaulted roof of reeds,
you are the hollow thuds of your boots
under the blue dome the blue silence the blue infinite
(that leaks into every infinitesimal pixel of your retina),
blinded by a relentless incurable disease,
undreamt dreams billowing in the mind
like opalescent morning mist swelling
up the slopes,
you look at me without seeing me,
i am an unchanging monologue
in front of an ever-changing looking glass,
i say much more
than you can hear"
and then the ink flowing back into the pen
("the miraculous spring
is not up but down,
down a white spiral beach
bristling with giant shells,
the reverse mirror image of the mountain
where compass needles and clock hands
become the same,
all twirling, all unwinding, and all
curling up towards the bottomless well
of gushing light,
soothed by chants of mermaids as you return
to the center, the water getting shallower,
the world spinning like you were
running inside endless corridors,
feeling the narrowing walls
like a wild beast trapped
in a labyrinth,
having forgotten who you are and why
you are here, in fact knowing
that you are not here at all,
that you never were anywhere,
descending to the bottom in order
to ascend to the top,
longing for the corals
that over the centuries
have been sculpting
your petrified self
in the most arcane depths,
time so irrelevant because
your chronology is written
on a Moebius strip"),
still unsure of whether
i am the gambler or the die,
and with the last glowing
drop of cosmic ink:
"you defile my landscape
with your memory's insinuations
of a doppelganger, i love
the company of these dull
speechless million-year old
boulders, you are never
the same climber twice,
a mountain is an island,
and you are its see",
no date, signed the mountain.
Hanimadhoo, 18 february 2012, 9:34
(Storm at sunrise)
My eyes revolve inside the rippling cramps of the thunderstorm,
spying the macabre crosscurrents of the impromptu river
as it cuts through the beach's soft smooth flesh and it flows into the ocean
and thus into inexistence, its helpless water clawed by crawling foam,
and i admire the coordinated somersaults of surfs leaping into the hoop of fire,
a thousand times as numerous as the tingling grains of sand in this stainless shore,
which is how
whatever wrinkles (footprints, shells, bones, seaweeds, flotsam) rumpled this place yesterday are being scientifically ironed out (more existence
reverting to inexistence),
until, disguised as bundles of caliginous tentacles, the god who lifted the sky from the smelt sea coins a new language of dawn that translates
the relentless rhythm of the wreckage
into the silence that floods the universe that has stopped contracting,
and, as i stand (shivering, barefoot, wading the breeze of icy flakes)
where the scarab that never furrows furrows,
the giant face of the planet whispers in my ears
"how wrong can the answers to all your questions be?"
Half Moon Bay, 23 january 2012, 7:06
None of this is what you wanted to be but this is what you are and will be for eternity, a loose bundle of dreams to be executed at dawn when the cosmic alarm goes off, so that you can parade your own intellectual nudity clad in the tattered garments of sunset as if nothing had happened during the night, your shadow ruthlessly lumbering through mazes of lifeless fossils and cyclopean carcasses, the purity of your selfhood reflected in the mystic copulation of sky and sea, both recast on the stage of the new day as self-immolating acolytes of the earth, an outcast of the socially approved avenues to timeless ecstasy, an actor incapable of conveying his character's last line before the curtain falls, aware of the blinding clarity of time's errant words, of the invulnerable truth of your resurrecting corpse, aware that we have no choice but to choose and i chose to choose a life of regret for the choices i made that have made choice all but unfeasible, that the very wish for less mayhem and less noise ends up making you wish for more mayhem and more noise, that death is not the predestined finale but the dying is like a lover ruminating on the end of a sordid affair, that those who begin the journey are not the ones who complete it, and, before the butterfly's last somersault, you proudly proclaim "i was born everywhere and i want to be buried everywhere" only to discover that you have been reading this poem backwards.
Half Moon Bay, 8 december 2011, 15:23
(The Last Digit of Pi)
This coast is the horizontal mirror-image of the vertical rim that bounded the valley, a mere emulation of the lost coast of the timeless continuum from which we emerged a life form of its own, and these waves echo the thousand voices of the wind speaking in foreign tongues to my shadow as it wound up the crags of the summit, and, unlike there, this is a site that requires no orientation because all routes lead to the same destination, a map that is a point, not a death but a one-instant life span that drains the entire hologram that shaped the world into objects and places, just like from above, higher than the taciturn clouds of the still-nature painting that i inhabited for a few minutes, the creek that i followed to the source through fields of dead grass and cracked granite slabs looked like a withered stalk, a toothless dragon furrowing into the flesh of the gorge, instead here is not a place but a distance that the tide will erase when the moon unfurls its flag, or the number that you obtain when you divide the semicircle of this sunset by the gaze of the sailor, or the clockwise perambulation of the peak by your last gasp, yes, this whole world is just a number, to be slowly discovered one digit at the time, but finally a ray of sunset cleaves a tunnel through the mist and nails me down on the beach like a butterfly crucified in the venerable display case of an antiquarian entomologist, and then i know that i have been mixing
the ignorance of the explorer with the blindness of the thinker.
Notes from Yosemite remixed at Half Moon Bay, 27 September 2011 19:15
The riddle is that there are therefore as many worlds as instants in a lifetime, and the explorer is precisely the riddle itself bound to endlessly write itself and multiply itself on the walls of the labyrinth that previous wanderers have drafted on the canvas of each and every world, a shifting target of shifting targets, everything that is knowable about me condensed in a chaotic rune scribbled on an ancient scroll by illiterate barbarians who lived long ago (what else is there? and where?) (what else knowable beyond our knowing it?)
(the knowledge of ignorance)
(alone at night on the mountain i wondered if a rock knows more than i do)
(is ignorance infinite knowledge?),
a riddle that will outlast me and that my vain quest will contribute to make even more incomprehensible to future automata.
Notes from Mt Humphreys remixed at Half Moon Bay, 7 September 2011 14:30
The peaks that surround the glacier, clutching at their own shadows as if they feared the avalanche of stars that is about to blur the border between the known and the unknown, instill the suspicion of a cipher that may loom over the natural language of landscapes the way children trade secrets with the invisible spirits of their virtual world, a reflection of that maverick thought which extends beyond the individual mind that originally conceived it into the collective unseen, the thought that is not thought but unthought, and that only at the end will we recognize as our own, and, as i fall asleep in my cosmic cradle, i sense that i am becoming part of an everlasting here, that this world of ours is only real when we dream, and that, ultimately, what we understand is not enough to understand why we understand it.
Evolution Lake, 3 September 2011 19:45
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Looking at the world through the prism of one's decoded science is not a simple
matter of organizing events in a coherent scheme and certainly not as trustworthy and genuine a way of creating sense
as the ancient silence of the peasant, of the shepherd and of the sailor,
all of whom stood painfully aware that there is more to the universe
than any fragmented monochromatic representation can convey, and that,
in fact, the set of all those representations is precisely what the world is not,
although that hologram of unconfirmed arbitrary axioms,
couched in a theoretical framework which points towards a fundamental shift in
the arithmetic of existence,
does bear a degree of similarity to the ceaseless movement of the whole and of what lies beyond,
to the boundless echo of the remotest time
that imparts an objective order to the reckless dance of the stars, and,
in the process, triggers a cascade of intimate revelations: that
the world is not yours, and that you are living into someone else's reality;
that your dying is a process that will lead not to an ending but to a beginning;
that, as you are struck by the arresting question, you contemplate your fate into someone else's mind;
that you have become a new theory of all things that will outlast you;
and that, ultimately, you can't grasp the meaning of your existence because
you don't exist.
Half Moon Bay, 11 August 2011 19:45
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Let me park an idea in the vacant lot of your arbitrary illusions while
you struggle somewhere between life and death to disentangle yourself from
the fishing net that an incomprehensible fate has thrown on you:
the sky is a discreet addict, the ocean a boisterous drunkard.
You examine the disappearing coastline that is like a wedge between reality and desire,
aware that you can't change the world overnight although the world does it to you every day just by ticking slowly inside your brain not far from your memories to make room for new ones if any more room can be made in such a cluttered cemetery, and you conclude without tears that it is not worth the trouble.
Your life is belatedly rescued by the beam that wrinkles the night,
exposing again the indented mandibles and arched bellies of the land,
and signaling that your friends are dancing their suicidal instincts away
while you injected them into a florid blown-glass sculpture encompassing the whole universe.
Indifferent to the restlessness of the living as they try to make sense of death, you care, however, for the darkness in between and for what it reveals.
Another sign welcomes you back to the uncharted path of your future: the stars pierce through the clouds, blinking beads of a broken necklace that cast a spell on our collective folly.
May their tomorrow be your yesterday.
Half Moon Bay, 30 July 2011 07:23 (after chatting with a suicidal girl)
When dawn comes like a pillow to rest my thoughts,
and to exorcise the enigmas chiseled in my mind by the spirits that inhabit the forest and its lakes,
i.e. to unkink the tentacular mirages kneaded in my brain by a multitude of senses,
then it will all sound logical:
the waterfalls murdering the echo of our footsteps as we braved the unknown,
the wind (how persuasive its harp, the harp of distance) stirring the pestilent fumaroles that know the Earth's secrets from memory,
the unquestionable femininity of the unsheltered mountains,
the few bleeding snowflakes still beading a twig (each one a perfect atomic recording of its fall from the sky),
the glimmering pinnacles of the summit like nails stuck into my eyes,
the majesty of nothingness as it unfolded into the universe and us...
but when the sheen of dawn (like the eyelashes soaked in mascara of a bashful girl) bathes my noetic bruises,
i will feel guilty for the tomorrow that yesterday obliterated
and i will amend the geography of this day to include a definition of
time that cannot exist independent of us
so that my life can sustain the illusion of happening here and now,
perhaps only an abbreviated reference to the entire universe...
and, lastly, when the tidal wave of dawn crashes on me, i shall turn to the Moon that is calling me: but where to?
Half Moon Bay, 10 July 2011 04:23 (on the way back from the Trinity Alps)
Tonight i can see the lights of the city, dyed by mist and moonlight,
shining across the soulless bay like the plumage of a mythical bird,
a silent dance of halos that celebrates my reluctant homecoming
(do you remember how frightened you were at night by the fireflies glowing in the jungle?),
a fact insinuated by the taciturn oracle inside me
"between chaos and predestination you draw power from the smiles and debris left behind",
but our body and our past are so tangled up that one cannot tell flesh from reverie,
especially when my footprints are already lost in the incipient darkness
(do you remember how the constellation of canoes dotting the lake at dawn reminded you of a musical score?),
in the loom that exacerbates the enigma of what or who are the myopic silhouettes swallowed in the retreating wake of this sunset and what makes them more than snorting naked savages as they uncork their flasks and ignite their weeds, the surfer playing a round of Russian roulette with his shadow,
invisible airplanes flapping their wings above us and humming that
the whole planet is just one huge raft and we are clinging to it hoping that it will not capsize the way the sky did
(do you remember the rain of mosquitoes and the wind of bats between the flaming tentacles of the lagoon and the roaring ashes of the ritual bonfire?),
and you cannot tell whether every day you grow younger and the world grows older
or viceversa from the clumsy fractal of our lives, a non-computable function
that approaches oblivion, Goedel's theorem applied to the city that will soon
be dreaming like a vagrant who is
camping at the beach amid all those ghosts moaning "i'll be your pillow when you sleep" from the caves that the tide has stripped naked
(do you remember how you eavesdropped on the swamp behind the spirit house, the stammering hymns of the crickets and of the frogs...),
the breeze that suddenly rises from the petrified foam and climbs the slopes of the shoreline blowing sand like gnats into the nostalgic hollowness of my face
(...the sobbing of the banana leaves on the thatched roofs?),
until an invisible hand ruffles my hair and
a premonition steers my wings towards the halo that i call "home",
as if a butterfly net had finally caught the untimely truth tiptoeing across my mind,
the moth of a thought (do you remember?),
the thought that is never the same after you think it
(do you remember?),
as lethal as the moon tumbling down the hill that i will have to climb after i turn one last time (do you?) to answer the embers bleeding beyond the horizon "yes i am here i am again i am yes i am" (do you?)
Half Moon Bay, 16 June 2011 20:13 (upon returning from New Guinea)
I remember, because i do and i forget because i don't,
that everybody is a ghost on the shores of the last ocean at the end of the world,
this shoreless ocean,
everybody howling in the waning dust of this wind that sounded like a requiem for all living beings when it first darted through the keyhole,
as the night is ferried by blind seagulls over the frothy waters of dawn, a single glimmer of which can induce all fires and earthquakes to reverse course,
that everybody is not here and the foam under my feet is the calligraphy of absence,
the only language that can inscribe the tightrope-walking nature of life in the morbid disease of my mind,
like a long-lost nursery rhyme that you used to hum as a child to all the raindrops circling around the window panes that reflected the book you were reading but not quite seeing, the tune that i have hummed to all the people i never met,
like the time in the forest when we took shelter under the tent of the spider to withstand the waterfall of colors dropping from the spiderweb's lone dewdrop when it was hit by the first sunrays,
except that in our days
the sun isn't so much about the progress we're making towards solving the ultimate mystery of why
the horizon reflects
so much of what does not matter in life but rather the emblem and the stigma of our failure to grasp that the enigma is inside us,
the mystery of why we explain mysteries instead of cherishing them,
is Blake's grain of sand really larger than my brain,
i being the one who scribbled the clouds in the sky
and is now incapable of reading his own handwriting,
though a voice deep inside keeps asking why are you afraid of darkness but not of light,
and another voice echoes that you are afraid of everything, even afraid of being immortal,
both voices spiraling out of control, and instead
the predictable arc of the constellations as they exit the stage invites me
to admire the non-cognitive aspect of reality that moons, birds and shadows have in common, to understand the momentous "No Trespassing" sign that a prankster planted on a dome of algae to challenge the tide,
so i wait to scream "good morning world" but don't blame me for this day that could be your last day if the paths of heroes and villains merge into one,
i only speak because i listen, and i listen because i speak, i because i and why i?
and just then the first sunrise of the universe knocks me to the ground.
Half Moon Bay, 1 May 2011 06:03 (remixed at home May 2-4)
(ideally written in the sand in the form of a spiral and then washed away
by the morning tide before anybody can read it)
And while the seashell's stillness and the lighthouse's emptiness reflect the untamed fire of this tide-less night (or perhaps just the frenzied squall of an ordinary life), i'm even more ambivalent than ever about the force that pulls and quarters everything that we can see from our astronomical towers, since even the flickering pebbles that i painstakingly separate from beach sand because they remind me of something else, at least superficially, even they possess the power to unlock terrible secrets about our origins, and i can't shake the feeling that this planet only imitates a vocabulary compiled from a morass conflation of geological and biological contradictions, of historical impossibilities, and for those of you ticking self-imploding clocks who believe that the ebbing and flowing of time provides a fair exit strategy from life, for those of you who are therefore unequivocally a step further up the ladder towards oblivion and eternal darkness, let the sun be subtracted from the sky if that makes you feel safer in your sail-less hulls, yet i will rather explore alone the sheer depths of the sunset that swallows us like supergravity or like an echo that against all odds has returned to the speaker to whisper something that was not said but should have been as if the speaker that i am were only a terrifying nickname for the nameless name of all names, thus, while you the blind dice throwers decide what cannot be decided, i shake the radioactive dirt off my crumbling shoes and i walk.
Half Moon Bay, 16 April 2011 00:23
(Quatour in D-moll for S.)
[Ideally read very slowly while listening to this performance]
You are waving goodbye
from one of the orbits
painted on the seashell
(your voice drowning
in the fossil hiss
of a million storms)
while i probe its hollow,
the mollusk's mausoleum,
drawn ever deeper by
the ventriloquist's echo
into the whirling chasm
of a reverse firmament
(my mind shrinking
as the spiral tightens),
touch-reading the graffiti
on the damp chalky walls,
like a quantum marble ball
thrown by a god's hand,
headed for the pulsing core,
for the untamed fire
that makes both of us
invisible to ourselves;
an endless dialogue
between two mirrors
facing each other.
Half Moon Bay, 16 January 2011 14:00
