The Poem of Existence

I call upon God to set me in the light

To pass me through the fire,

And to burn me blue in the feast.

To choose the words as they come,

And to make the rhapsody of existence dance, in front of my eyes,

As I pen this poem of reflection in adoration of existence,

And singing the mystery that can be felt,

Easy like sipping a glass of water,

If one crystalizes in parallel mirrors.

Standing on the furrows of the past,

I let the flow of words take me to the future.

Embracing the only weapon that I know: deeds of heart,

I aim at the darkness below,

Patiently drawing the light from the source,

To burn in an effortless everlasting oil,

In the overflowing love.

Hence the journey of the hero:

Standing on the throne of Kingdom,

I fall from the roof,

In the sight of a beautiful temptation,

And the puzzle of ego:

How would I feel, If God told me "you are not the chosen one"?

And this is the dilemma of the hero:
Knowing that s/he is chosen to be told so,
["Humans are at-tuned {ge-stimmt} 
to what de-termines {be-stimmt} their essence.
In this de-termining, 
humans are touched and called forth by a voice {Stimme}
that peals all the more purely
the more it silently 
reverberates 
through what speaks." (1)]

To become one, who one is not,

And to become one, who one is,

In the journey of Coincidentia Oppositorum,

In the flow of “is” and “is not”—in the flow of becoming.

[Memento: Evil is Despair. Even in the underworld Hell,

Don't lose heart.]

I set my journey,

In the tumultuous knowing

That one is not compatible with the divine,

Unless one seeks the healing in the healing of the Other,

[Synchronously: in loving life in all its manifestations,

One loves God,

And in loving God, one loves oneself.

All the same—as belonging together—in concert.]

As I go through the turbulent of the tests,

I learn to kiss the hands of pain,

As I suffer from the expression of my own haste,

I wash my heart in the eternal fire of return,

Dancing on the wallows of remorse,

I learn the grace as coming close,

In ecstatic glow of a falling star,

I see my endless sorrow,

Looking in the mirror,

I embrace the horror
[The mirror image is hopeless.]

Sitting in the fire of regret,

I wait for the antidote.

I was born to wonder

You deemed,

I was born to laughter,

You sow,

Entangled in the breach of my own soul,

You held me as the bridge for broken hearts,

Standing on the shadow of my own grief,

You torched me to open the pathos of dark,

I came from lamenting and agony of Job,

You taught me to burn blue in the tongues of fire,

I wondered in the interfold,

Insatiable and in thirst of water,

You asked me to dissipate,

I feared evanescence,

You asked me to divulge my soul,

Frightened I cried, “it is cruel”,

You soothed me with a smile,

And told me gently, repeatedly, loud, and clear: Despair is Evil.

You are in the anguish of loss,

You were in the way the Buddha got lost,

Why did You not appear to him under the fig tree?

Why did Jesus damn the barren tree?

Why did I have to long you madly under the willow tree?

I was washed away in the dust of pleasure as the escape,

You held me fast: “thus, we are incompatible.”

You ask me to shed rivers of tears,

To write forever rhapsodies of joy and fear,

To stay calm when the little enemies come near,

To caress the worm that eats within my corpuscles,

I ran away, oh my God, it is too difficult.

And the heart was bitterly empty,

Despondency echoed from every side and nook,

That “Reality is Indifferent to Us”—my head in the noose.

I have been diving into a cold abyss, wounded.

And I didn’t even call your name,

As it was the Age of Man and the End,

I thought I will master the world,

In you, with you, or without you,

And waited for the admiration of the crowd,

And made little gods from every simple glittering glow,

And swam in the pleasure of success and name,

And repeated my emptiness into passages of vain,

And made humanism the centerpiece of my pray,

Hence prey, I became to my own self-image.

I went through sad incisive falling,

And bowed down to my own thinking and forgot my calling,

In spiral movements of ouroboros,

I repeated myself in eternal return,

And lost myself in the house of mirrors,

And sought glory and pleasure as the elixir,

And identified and desired bonobos as my origin and peer.

Thus the slave of Anthropocene, I became the king of sorrow,

And killed the spirit,

Lied, cheated, and betrayed tomorrow,

Raised modern slavery,

Colonized the world in my own derision,

Vainglorious, called today’s victory,

The triumph of reason— [ants, cockroaches, and germs sneezed at this season.]

You told me was Enlightenment,

The reign of darkness of the soul,

To worship Man,

Founded on the magic of alleles,

And the gene, its principle of sufficient reason.

Eating its own tail, seeking its own image, desiring its everlasting dominance,

It survives for the sake of survival,

And I get degrees in Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard.

And in my self-worship, self-congratulatory, self-glory, self-immortal,

I worshipped libido, economy, the machine, and the natural world.

Homo incurvatus in se,

Man turned in on himself,

Hence: viva humanism!

Homo biologicus, homo economicus,

Homo sociologicus, homo historicus,

And homo mathematicus.

The falling of science into blind technology,

You gave us this, didn’t You?

You made it possible?  Didn’t You?

As well the holocaust of Antisemitism and Semitism,

Nationalism, racism, sexism,

And killing in the name of speciesism,

And cruelty in the name of theism? Didn’t You?

To see our falling into abyss of nihilism?

To see from the precipice of homo incurvatus in se,

Into the depth of our soul?

Can I not cry for the rivers of blood and world wars?

Can I not mourn, for the cruelty of mutilated bodies, woman and child?

Can I not choke for the subjugation of women?

Can I not whine for the merciless beheadings and murder?

And You brought us to the edge of annihilation,

Didn’t You?

To see with our own eyes,

All the sciences, and all the knowledge,

And all our technological advance,

[Reducing the real to mathematical entities,]

And to make the monster and to become robots,

Didn’t You?

And didn’t You bring everything to the surface?

And let us say in our own words,

That Anthropocene, the Age of Man, is the 6th Mass Destruction,

That we have lost the reverence of all living beings to the Gene?

You held language to speak us clear and loud,

That love is the only engine of survival,

And that the lock and the key both are in our chests?

In body and soul?

You did it, didn’t You?

You told us from the time immemorial,

That You opened in our hearts the paths of pleasure and joy,

The way of self, and the way of soul,

You spoke us into conscience,

In a clear voice,

And You sow the seed of eternal,

in our multifarious howl.

In the bridge between tears and the cure,

In the breach between words and deeds,

Between thinking and desire,

Between real and fantasy,

In the breach between me and You,

You have founded the pathos and ethos,

You have made the hero and the villain,

And if it be Your will, You will heal us whole.

And end this agonizing tremor.

And You made echoes and mirrors,

And You made riddles and puzzles,

And You made longing and love,

And You made loss and home,

And You made rivers and stone,

And You made tangible lust,

And You made our grieving hearts,

And You made fountains of joy,

You made despair,

And You made hope,

You told us in an eternal voice:

End this harrowing night, it is all your choice.

Word of words and the measure of all measures,

Blessed is the name, the name be praised.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(1) From The Principle of Reason, Lecture 7, by Heidegger