embodied ecstasy

Hello friends. After 15 years and many thousands of posts, I no longer feel that the beyondmetaphysics blog represents who I am or who I am becoming.

On the bridge I stood recently in the amber night. From afar came a voice: a golden drop poured over the trembling surface. Gondolas, lights, music - drunken it floated out into the twilight … My soul, a lute invisibly plucked, sang out a secret gondola song, trembling with iridescent joy. - Did anyone hear it …?

The muscles that I thus created were at one and the same time simple existence and works of art; they even, paradoxically, possessed a certain abstract nature. Their one fatal flaw was that they were too closely involved with the life process, which decreed that they should decline and perish with the decline of life itself. This oddly abstract nature I will return to later; more important here is the fact that, for me, muscles had one of the most desirable qualities of all: their function was precisely opposite to that of words.

The theme of the estrangement of body and spirit, born of the craving I have described, persisted for a long time as a principal theme in my work. I only came to take gradual leave of it when I at last began to consider whether it was not possible that the body, too, might have its own logic, possibly even its own thought; when I began to feel that the body’s special qualities did not lie solely in taciturnity and beauty of form, but that the body too might have its own loquacity.

Of late, I have come to sense within myself an accumulation of all kinds of things that cannot find adequate expression via an objective artistic form such as the novel. A lyric poet of twenty might manage it, but I am twenty no longer, and have never been a poet at any rate. I have groped around, therefore, for some other form more suited to such personal utterances [...]