Etel Adnan
from Sea

The seeing and the saying: This early afternoon the young spring illuminated alleys lined with green trees. But why say it when it’s not up to words to convey a reality of this sort? The vision has already fused with the universe’s history. Now, it’s all gone! The same is true of the sea. To linger can lead to suicide, an experience that eludes narration.

We build on the ephemeral, follow a thyme bush’s fragrance, and discover that Guernica is filled with smoke. Somebody stole the lamp. The war was lost due to compositional failure. Airplanes, stop it! Beatific vision requires elevation. We are engaging you to pay the mortgage on the groom’s bed, on the bride’s torn little dress.

Look how things are stretched beyond their limits! First, one comes with flashlights, then, hears voices. (A sand storm is displacing mountains). In their agony, they dream of living on a farm. Afterwards, the generals will eat human flesh and swell with the bombs that their bellies are sheltering.

A few camels will show up by the stream. Their enlarged memory-chambers contain images from the war. A soldier on foreign land can’t extinguish the evil eating at his feet. Those who are poor are not afraid. They get help from the dead. They will wait long enough for invading armies to age, get married, and die.

This mass of sorrow, this packaging of the heart, this fear running under swift waves, all run into a will at turns triumphant or broken.

And, unleashed, clusters of forces are assailing the Night Palace, the self’s fortress; but it will withstand their assault until Being’s own demise: o enchantment, o chaos!

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From any point to another there’s infinite distance. That’s why time has to be eternal. We went to the moon once under a propitious weather and loved each other in ways we couldn’t achieve on our terrestrial habitat. Once in a while, we laughed.

Microwave radiations pour over Earth. They penetrate the brain and transform it into a furnace. The fish dive deep. Islands quiver and rock back and forth. This turmoil brings joy as well as many questions.

Poetry reaches the unsaid, and leaves it unsaid. It’s familiar, it’s indecently close, overpowering at times, as gray as open skies over melancholy mountains; It is what it is, and for ever the question remains about its nature, and why we’re still looking for an answer.

Mermaids misunderstood vileness, and the sea — sheet of brown paper calm and brittle — covered their voice. She provided a surplus of energies to the land’s massive interior. California has a breath of its own. It’s very likely that the first man stared at her with incomprehension. My share of the cosmic brain sees her as incestuous, and obsessed. Noon fetches her bottom ground.

The monsoon’s twisted arrogance keeps us awake. The sun is consumed with grief over the soul’s lunacy that shines darkly on pools covered with soft leaves.

A woman possessed by love unfulfilled haunts the cemetery. Tombs must remain closed even if she needs to open them in search of her lost passion. Something ancestral stirs in her guts.

There’s space, for sure, we’re of it, but where’s time? Wherefrom? There’s change, and it is movement. No doubt. So time, abstracted from change, is movement represented by a watch’s needles. The measure of change we call time. As we fear death, a fatal change, we fear its progression in everything. Although we love change and marvel at movement.

Outer space is morally neutral. Not a solution. This planet still friendly. To embrace it in its lovelier manifestations. Let time bypass your thoughts. What is that thing that makes us wait for non-events?

Each second may be the last, that’s why even stones worry. Old instincts, deeply buried, are resurfacing. Despair is morose. Short-winged rough winds. Sea vomiting corpses. Earth and sea are fighting each other. For the return of the waters.

Finally, Nietzsche didn’t empty the world of its past but, instead, drained his own mind. His brain became an empty shell resonating with his former writings.

Clouds are turning into a furnace devoid of revelation.