Piero Scaruffi's poem "Synthesis"

Triptych (for the Beginning of Time) - Odes (2004-07)
piero scaruffi

Read the accompanying essays | Look at the accompanying photos | Read the accompanying novel

"I've been looking for
you: where are you?
Are you in your articles?
Are you in your poetry?
Are you with your friends?
I can't find you anywhere.
You go to everywhere,
but it seems that you
have lost yourself."
(Letter from my friend Tao Zhu,
Beijing, february 2006)

Prelude - Ode to Nothingness

It only makes sense to write
of what one knows nothing of.

"You are something
that everybody else
is doing. Elsewhere."

I comprehend the answers,
but the questions elude me.

"A paradise shimmers
on the other side
of your mind. Your
mind is not yours.
The more the less".

The question is not
"why" but "how":
how can we be?

To understand is to forgive,
or, at least, to silently recast
the fiction so that it will
tell a story with the same
plot but a different ending.

(And what if god is one of us?
What if i am god, and a divine
amnesia has erased the world
as it was supposed to be?)

Part 1. Eros - Invisible Architecture

(Ode to You)
"The symphony of crystals
that explodes in your eyes
when nobody is looking
will it outlast
its echo, or sink
heavier than the I
into oblivion's
ever recurring
nightmare?"

(We speak as if
we were one soul
in one universe
instead
of multitudes
of yesterdays
in waterfalls
of emptiness).
(Ode to Birth)
I hear the sound
of the other side,
and louder every hour,

the melody inside the egg,

the tide that lulls us
ante litteram,

before anything is revealed,

the glacial erosion
that accounts for the
unexpected crevice
on the way to our
salvation,

a clangor of obelisks, crosses
and prayer-wheels, always farther
away than you plot them to be,

the cracking of the shell,

the divine hourglass
bleeding stars on horizons,

the buzz of the giant brain,
each moon a neuron
that pumps blood into the others,
each galaxy a super-thought
that thinks itself and all.
(Ode to Knowledge/ I)
Consciousness is all reality.
There is nothing beyond
consciousness, although
there might be something
out there, after all.
Reality dwells at the edge
of infinity. It constitutes
a border, a line drawn
in the sand, a twisting
contour of days, the crest
of the wave as it crashes
upon the reef, the horizon
as it sinks at sunset
in the eyes of the castaway.
The fabric of reality
has been torn by a godless
supernatural order.
We emerged from that crack.
I am the experience
of myself, as i survived
the cataclysm and saw
the other drown. I swam
to shore, therefore i am.
Whatever can be know,
i am it.
(Ode to Chaos)
The wind wove our shadows
into the fabric of twilight
as we stared at the city,
at the swarms of fireflies
trapped inside their nests
all around the silent bay;
the uncoordinated design
of all those stories
looming upon us like
perpetual premonitions
of one momentous event
that would at last impose
a new magnificent order
on the surrounding chaos.
Yet, the vast dark skies
of your eyes reflected
a different world, one
without them.

I wanted to tell you
that the invisible becomes
visible from above.
Seeing the unseeable
seemed a logical way
to end our journey.
But your smile was asking
for far less: atoms of sense
to crack the obscure koan
of the future.

(When you looked outside
to the distant hills,
you missed perhaps
the blooming flowers
behind you).

I watched you plant
the seeds of sunrise
into the heavens (amid
the receding rumbles
of a postponed
apocalypse).

Let us walk
to the end
of the world
and find out
what lies
beyond.
(Ode to the Butterfly)
The ghost of you lingers
long after you have been
devoured by the thought
of another feverish sun
that never truly set,
long after the tedious
frail progress of time
has relented its grip
on my unwelcoming mind.
We stare at each other
across this miniature
universe that centuries
of geological disasters
chiseled like an austere
monument to mortal love,
knowing without knowing,
butterflies that flutter
for a day and that think
it will be forever.
(Ode to the Moon)
I recede from the visible universe
in the opposite direction to the Moon,
the blunt scythe harvesting nights,
while the endless agony of gravity
leaks the lost alphabet of stars
in which sunrise will be written.

The waters curling in the air
disturb the withered horizon,
still flickering, still hissing,
and its calm, unwinding murderer.

Darkness, perhaps, is the true fire,
burning all echoes that wouldn't stop.
It is the edge that we wouldn't cross,
that we ought to smelt until it glows.

I cannot fathom an ending to this fear,
i the bleeding shell played by tides,
i the sand castle melting in the foam,
i the vanishing footprint with no name,
i the drop of steam exploding in the surf:
the fear of being lost;
the fear of being found;
the fear of running too fast;
the fear of flying too high;
the haunting fear, perhaps,
of not fearing enough.

The moon unleashes its wake of dreams,
like an oracle that foretells the end.
(Ode to the Reader)
I am the reader
of the reverse book
that creates its author,
the reader's lover.

Part 2. Thanatos - Cognitive Archeology

(Ode to Life/ I)
How can life
be so fragile?
How can my life
mean so little
to so many?
(Ode to Death)
I am afraid of how
afraid i will be.

I am myself
only when
i think
of death;
the fictions
recede,
and become
philosophy;
and philosophy
science,
and science
history,
history
of the self.

"This is, after all,
my last will,
and one, for once,
of no beginning,
of no memories;
and of no ending.
Nothing. Nobody.
Nowhere.

May the last minute
be like the first one,
an act of reversing
the non-existence
of centuries gone,
redeeming a past
both vividly remembered
and never experienced.

"Always" and "never"
are the two sides
of each instant.

For the time being
the ultimate question
remains unthought,
a redundant postscript.

Death towers
over all else.
(Ode to Truth)
A good day to die: is there such a day?
I wonder if there is a good day
for giving up, if there is a moment
in time that matters more (or less)
than the rest of time, the moment
when the final syllable forms
of the solemn convoluted speech
we have been preparing for a day
that we don't know has come.

Life seesaws between moments of truth
and the glaring truths of a moment.
(Ode to the Dead)
The city
of the dead
predated
the city
of the living.

Death makes life
how we know it.

We, the dead,
are the sole
architects
of our existence.
The building,
of course,
exists only
while it is
being built.

We master the art
of what can be said
without saying it,
and we leave this life
without quite knowing
how to fully explain
what happened to us.

(Nothing that can be
perceived, is worth
learning). In a sense,
there is no sense.
In the same sense,
sense is all there is.
(Ode to the Sky)
Are there other planets
on which the sky is blue?

As a child, i often
wondered if everybody
died but me, if i was
the only immortal.
As an adult, i wonder
what it would be like
to be the only one
who dies, the only
mortal among
immortals.
(Ode to the Mother)
Something about the mortality
of your own mother strikes you
as a cosmic revolution.
The decomposition
of that familiar body
that will never reappear
has changed the universe
and the temporal dimension
forever. "Now" morphed
into a different category,
that is less about time
than about rebirth.
She is leaking her soul,
into the earth, slime
to be collected
by the rains
of future worlds.

Before the funeral
i had read about the sky
not being blue except
on this planet. While
marching in the procession
down the deserted streets
of her native village,
i stared at the sky,
not at the coffin.

I did hold infinity
in the palm of my hand:
pebbles, shells, berries, twigs,
lichens, crystals, bubbles,
leaves, petals, and, closer
and closer, pecks of dust,
pollen, flecks of dirt,
a simple dot of nothing.
Eternity, though, evokes
a furtive snake that winds
its way on a sand dune,
whittling furrows of powdery
breeze as it vanishes
in a dazzling mirage.

The distance
from being
to not being
is a blue sky.
(Ode to the Fossils)
Who
is listening
to my complaint,
who shall deliver
the sentence,
and who
shall remain
to dispose
of the coral
that no ocean
will ever
claim as bait?

What is death?
What is it
that is happening
to me, to us,
to them? We "are"
death. We are
born fossils,
but we die
brains.

Part 3. Chronos - Sidereus Nuncius

(Ode to Spacetime)
In the face of
the endless free fall
shaping our universe,
what is one expected
to expect?
(Ode to the Past)
How odd
that we
experience
the past
before
the future
when, in fact,
it is the future,
not the past,
that we desire.
And how odd
that we
are so eager
to learn
the future
when, in fact,
the ultimate
future is
our eternal
death.
(Ode to Memory)
Memories are often similar to stars,
grouped in clouds of curious shapes,
flotsams of past ignited by darkness,
unfinished and immutable, dead and,
yet, alight with bonfires of worlds;

remote glimmers of an intimate eternity
beyond the boundaries of public mortality.

Memory is a lantern

to walk in the tunnel
that we dug,
to dwell in the cave
that we chose.
(Ode to the Future)
All we hear
when we whistle
is the echo
of a silence
shouting at us
the beginning
that we forgot.

(When a shining maze
of timeless filaments
morphed into the soul
of everything
and everywhere,
the future,
not the past,
was created).

We could remember
ourselves before
we existed, but,
mostly, we don't
want to. Memory
of the future
is less painful
than of the past.

Hence there are no traces
of our secret journeys
to the source of life.

The aimless carillon
keeps playing its tune
across space and time.
The beaches, glimpsed
from far away, do not
reveal any harbor, or,
for that matter, any
route.
(Ode to Meaning)
If life is nothing
but a pearl in a casket;

if the scent that we revere
as "death" has trailed us
from birth, permeating
the very air that we breathe;

if joy and sorrow are mere
reflections of algorithms
that we unwillingly perform
until we run out of digits
to be stored and computed;

if the race is to end with us
squatting alone in a corner
and whispering a lost name
to echo through the maze;

who will sweep the dead
leaves from the ground
when i shut the door
behind me and follow
the rainbow towards
the stately resignation
of the shore?

What will keep track
of one's arrivals and departures
that, like the sloping ripples
tattooed on the skin of the lake
by the sobbing swan moored to
an invisible center of gravity
and propelled by the universal urge
to make the unfamiliar familiar,
radiate the ancestral meaning
of one's struggle for survival
to the rest of the world?
(Ode to Eternity)
Knowing is not being.

You can measure eternity, if you
have to, along the rainbow
sculpted on the hologram
of the iridescent thread
hung by a spider like a note
between two flitting leaves.

At twilight a trail
of ants scoured
the unfolding
carcass of a snail.
A death in the forest
of a nameless animal
reminded me
of the sea shell,
of the eternal breathing
of dead beings
of ages ago:
no sun could have filled
the florid spirals
with so many bits
of the cosmic speech.
Wandering inside
the endless vortex
of the chalky path,
like a smiling face
trapped in a vast
maze of mirrors,
the drone was powerless
to cease and vanish.

Eternity lasted
only a second;
but the present
shall outlast all.

Being is not knowing.
(Ode to Space)
Proust's
telescope of time,
memory, amplifies
distant echoes.
Remembering
is compulsory
time travel.
The journey
is endless
and involuntary.
Why is the past
so important
that we have
to revisit it
forever? What
makes so inevitable
the impossible?
Why do places
that have long
ceased to exist
survive and thrive,
endlessly reshaped
by our memory?

Part 4. Appendix: A History of Time

There are walls
that we cannot
climb.
There are bridges
that we cannot
cross.

4.a Bridges

(Ode to Nature)
Nature's disdain
for truth
is self-evident:
the scent
of the pollen
disguises
the bee's true
intentions.

The calm
and articulate
candor of sunset
blindfolds the eye
that is supposed
to roam the skies
for signs of life.
Life is unlike
death, we are told
by an inner voice
or we tell ourselves
that so we are told.

To live and be
like a flower;
to live and become
the message itself;
not a silent, living
thing at all. Let maya
unlock the full
inexplicable power
of the largest ocean
of all, the one
inside us.
(Ode to Childhood)
When i was a child, the world,
with all its mysteries scattered
all around my body, was a question
that i dared not ask. I was not afraid:
i was overwhelmed. I did not know yet
the language that could weave together
the words, the sounds, the meaning
which, like a new map, were replacing
the twitching fabric of my dreams.

In the wake of the dying kite,
i understood the meaning of time,
of everybody's time, of the fear
that wise ancient masters buried
in the gilded spires of churches.

At a beach far away from any ocean,
i, the observer, stood in awe of life
and its infinity: i was nowhere nothing,
but life was always there, and beyond.
I, the wave, ran deep into the woods
to feel it into my soul, to learn
its tongue, boundless strains of myth
pervading every cell of my brain.

Since then i, the eigenstate, often toasted
to the infinity of life, because everywhere
everything appeared the same, and nowhere
did nothingness transpire. Life is the name
for the emerging infinity of all infinities.
(Ode to Myself/ I)
(The universe
is easier
to understand
sometimes if
you think of it
not as a "You"
but as an "I").
(Ode to the Mirror)
The mirror
doesn't know
whom it reflects.
And yet a mirror
is still someone,
although someone
else, or multiple
selves, not itself.
And, of course,
that is true
of each of us.
Shroud the mirror.
Bury its soul.
Release the ghost.
There is more
to life than
your name.

Everything
is a mirror,
isn't it?
Objects reflect
each other,
don't they?
Each thought as well,
each action. Reality
revolves inside
a hall of mirrors.
A recursive symbol,
a baffling spiral
of nested loops.

Existence is about
being a mirror image
of something else,
of everything else.
(Ode to Knowledge/ II)
"You are not afraid"
"Yes, of course i am"

No, you cannot be:
you are fearless
in a way that you
have not learned
to recognize yet.

(Cohere you could not make it, Ezra,
but i cannot make it end either).

The truth is not in you
or in me, the truth is
in between, and beyond
(the stream of consciousness
of the objects that surround us
being no less real than ours).

Time emerges from frail
fluctuations of reality.
The future is a reconnaissance
of invisible territories.
Unlike what Plato foretold,
remembering my name in the
darkest cave was easy enough.

And suddenly you know,
and the knowledge of knowing
repudiates your previous self,
and you are but a dialogue
between what you know
and what you do not know.

Like a blind man
i have seen light
where it was only
utter darkness.

Lightning feeds the sky.
In a sense, the ending has
been removed from the story.
(Ode to Everything)
We often confuse
everything that exists
and the existence
of everything.
It is easier to erase from the universe
an immortal thing than a mortal one.

But isn't it futile
to infer eternity
from the flow of time?
The continuity of all lives
is the discontinuity
of immortalities.

Emptiness is full of entities
that interact with each other
and vanish into the vanishing
of the others.

The world at large
has evolved into a state
of being in which its origins
are no longer what they were.

Most of the time
nothing really happens.
Yet, everything happens
all the time. There are
no answers. Only
questions.
(Ode to Humanity)
Microscopes
and telescopes
allow us to see
the unseeable.
By their nature, they
inject a new mind
in our body to feel
the unfeelable.

Human knowledge
is bounded
by the inadequacy
of our senses
to connect
with scales
larger or smaller
than ourselves.

We only know
the dimension
that communicates
through forms
of energy that
our bodies can
intercept.

The meanings
that we assign
to the very small
and the very large
are mediated
by the tools
that we invent.
Science translates
an incomprehensible
foreign language
into the vernacular
of our daily lives
by replacing our
sensory experience
with alluring visions
of worlds that are
homologous to ours.

Our mind, in vacuo,
could not imagine
the ontology
of the world
that contains us;
nor of the world
that is contained
in us. Reality
is a runaway loop
from our minds
to our tools
to our minds.

4.b Walls

(Ode to Truth/ Part II)

If everything begins because there is
an end to fulfill, why do we feel
the urge to turn back, and cease,
abandon the struggle and be less
rather than more?
Why do shadows trail behind bodies
instead of leading them?
Where are the instructions
that we are supposed to follow
for writing the instructions
that others will follow?

It seems to me, from this cave
of ancient thought, that our fire
is but borrowed light
whose source always shines
in the other's gaze.

Truth is elsewhere, but
where is elsewhere?
(Ode to Thought)
Our minds
have bodies
that think.

Bodies
encapsulate
the world
for minds
to know it.
The fiction
of our science
is the psychology
of our religion.
As we focus,
the focus shifts.
Thought is
indeterminate
to the extent
that we think
what can be
thought.

Our bodies
have minds
that walk.
(Ode to Life/ II)
When the lights
are switched off,
the actors
begin to see
the absolute
truth that lies
between the curtains
and the audience,
and to taste
the bitter poison
of the fiction.
(Ode to Tomorrow)
It happened in a dark
room of an old wing
of the campus.
When someone said to
the physicist "there's no
tomorrow", the physicist
replied "there are only
tomorrows".

Lingering on the burden
of being the interpreter
of my own nonsense
(staring at the image
of myself staring at me),
i acknowledged the bitter
truth: the steepest wall
to climb is inside, since
what makes us (the wake
of the seafarer ahead of us)
is also what consumes us.

The physicist smiled at me,
from wherever he was,
a point in the sky:
"Tomorrow will be
someone else's
yesterday."
(Ode to the Soul)
When the sudden clouds
leaked kites on the beach, i had
a vision of dripping filaments
of gravity casting silence between
the ink of these words.
I felt the ocean was a twitching
brain transplanted from the skull
of the sky to the vagina of the earth.
When the city gates were pried open
by countless shades of darkness,
the tales of the survivors
emptied the night, the drunk
architecture of their faces draining
the alluvial floods of their fates.
So it is that rust forms in the time warp,
and the universe appears to be
a vast mirror of my withering
soul, of this orbiting poem.
(Ode to Light)
Nothingness envelops
even the thought of it.

"We emerged tuned to the harmony
of creation, languages without
a voice, voices without a sound."

(To explain
the unexplainable
we often tell it
in the foreign idiom
of the explainable).

We gasped in an abyss
of meaning.
Then we were redeemed
by prophets
who had survived the
cataclysm.

And now, out of the labyrinth
that science has erected for us,
we have, unwillingly, become
prophets ourselves, forever bound
to create ignorance and apocalypse
under the pretense of knowledge.

Everything radiates
from darkness,
because only darkness
can be seen:
light blinds.
(Ode to Blindness)
This is, after all,
a universe of blind beings,
that do not see the path,
nor the destination.

The blind live
in the world
that they can hear.
They visit a place
by listening to
its sounds.
They inhabit space
that is alive, only
when it is alive.
They too are made
of time, Jorge,
persistent time.
They hear
the ticking
but they
cannot watch
what happens
to the minute hand
of the clock
as it gently drifts
towards Dali's desert.
To the blind
every tick
is the same.

Blindness is the absence.
The absence of reality;
the absence even of absence.

4.c Footnote: A Theory of the End

(Ode to the Voyagers)
What needs our restless sorrow
to carve love in the quartz
of eternity like the lava flow
carves a canyon in the flesh
of the earth, shall need
our forgiveness.

(Upon reaching the land
at the end of the map
the voyagers discovered
that the sand was gilded,
and hastily returned to the boats,
afraid that, during the night,
they had missed the proper route,
and thus resumed the voyage,
indifferent to siren calls,
without yet realizing
that beyond the horizon
there is no land as such,
only rewinding of time
and mirror images of lands
ransacked and mapped out
in previous expeditions).

The map must be turned upside down
and all names reversed. The world
looks different, but it is the same.
Life is not a journey
and is not a destination:
it is the perpetual memory
of something worth living.
It is the memory of what
will never be the same,
all the laughter and tears
that may never return
but will forever be here.

All gather
around the grave of time;

Life is a memory
of itself arising
from the silence
of so much grief.

(The surroundings of life,
the daily expeditions
in search of survivors,
in a word the survival
itself, are to life what
the corpse is to death:
a macabre composition
of limbs which do not exist
anymore than the blue
of the sky exists).
Our destiny seems to be the waiting,
our souls lost in form, seeds
frozen under thick sheets of snow.
(We are Penelopes not Ulysseses)
The relation between the distance
and the destination is a measure
of the waiting.

(Ode to Life/ III)
The secret of what is
lies in the secret
of what isn't.

Life is the empty
sound of what remains...

...in the desert,
the sun flipping
through the sand dunes
like a weary librarian
through the pages
of a misplaced book.
Life is a footnote
to all that was before.

Life is time in space,
bounded by thoughts.
Life is life.
(Ode to Death/ II)
(Life is about
finding solutions
to solvable problems.
I yearn for the stage
when, instead,
we'll find solutions
to unsolvable problems).
(Ode to Myself/II)
I am ready.
But for what?
A collective or
an intimate
apocalypse?

Is the summit
the end?
If not here,
where?
(Ode to Life/ IV)
Life is an arcane metaphor
that we follow to its dead
end. Slowly we become
metaphors of ourselves.
(Ode to the Shadow)
"You don't know what to say."

("Lastly we shall see
more kinds of shadows,
never the sun as it is" -
Plato). Life is a question
in the form of an answer.

"Yes, i know what to say:
I don't know how to say it."

I am god.
(Ode to Silence)
(As well as the creature
that i forgot i created).

"We should speak once,
and then never again".

Forgive me
for not
forgiving you.