Villach, Austria - 20071. “How many masks wear we, and undermasks, / Upon our countenance of soul, and when, / If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks, / Knows it the last mask off and the face plain? / “The true mask feels no inside to the mask / But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes. / Whatever consciousness begins the task / The task’s accepted use to sleepness ties / Like a child freighted by its mirrored faces, / Our souls, that children are, being thought-losing, / Foist otherness upon their seen grimaces / And get a whole world on their forgot causing; / And, when a thought would unmask our soul’s masking / Itself goes not unmasked to the unmasking.”
2. “I am nothing / I shall always be nothing / I can only want to be nothing / Apart from this, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”
3. ”I am the escaped one,
After I was born
They locked me up inside me
But I left.
My soul seeks me,
Through hills and valley,
I hope my soul
Never finds me.”
4. “If that apparentt part of life's delight / Our tingled flesh-sense circumscribes were seen / By aught save reflex and co-carnal sight, / Joy, flesh and life might prove but a gross screen. / Haply Truth's body is no eyable being, / Is the choked vision of blindfolded eyes. / Wherefrom what comes to thought's sense of life? Nought. / All is either the irrational world we see / Or some aught-else whose being-unknown doth rot / Its use for our thought's use. Whence taketh me / A qualm-like ache of life, a body-deep / Soul-hate of what we seek and what we weep.”
5. “Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.”
6. "…Since I was a child I have the tendency for creating around me a fictitious world, and makes myself surrounded by friends and people who never existed. (I don't know, may it be clear, whether they did not exist in fact or whether that is me, myself, who does not exist. For matters like these, and for all the others, we should not assume a dogmatic view.) Since I realize that I am something that I call Self , I care to work out carefully in figure, movements, character and history these multiple unreal figures that are so visibly clear to me and so mine as all the things coming from whatever we use call, perhaps abusevely, real life. This tendency, which happens everytime I realize that I am a Self, has always been with me, changing the kind of music by which it keeps me delighted, but never changing its way for delighting."
7. “We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the color of our notions about what we do know: If we call death a sleep it's because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it's because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy. But that's how all life is; at least that's how the particular way of life generally known as civilization is. Civilization consists in giving an innapropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same. A table made out of pinewood is a pinetree but it is also a table. We sit down at the table not at the pinetree. “
8. ”What grieves me is not
What lies within the heart,
But those things of beauty
Which never can be . . .
They are the shapeless shapes
Which pass, though sorrow
Cannot know them
Nor love dream them.
They are as though sadness
Were a tree and, one by one,
Its leaves were to fall
Half outlined in the mist.”
9. ”When my gaze is clear
I think and write
the way flowers wear color,
yet less perfectly is
my mode of expression
for I lack the divine simplicity
of being entirely myself
and nothing more.
When I look
I am moved--
and I am nature--
the breeze rising lightly--
a wind going by.
I do not bother with rhymes.
I have no philosophy.
If I talk of nature, that is not because
I know what nature is
but because I love it.
My village creek is
great because it's free.
The best mysticism is simple
and does not think.
It lives on the top of a hill
in a lonely whitewashed house
and sings to the rivers.
The flying bird leaves no trace
nor marks the earth with her track.
She flies by the mystery of things.
And as for the sun each morning--
It rises on time.”
10. “Whether we write or speak or do but look / We are ever unapparent. What we are / Cannot be transfused into word or book, / Our soul from us is infinitely far. / However much we give our thoughts the will / To be our soul and gesture it abroad, / Our hearts are incommunicable still. / In what we show ourselves we are ignored. / The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged / By any skill of thought or trick of seeming. / Unto our very selves we are abridged / When we would utter to our thought our being. / We are our dreams of ourselves souls by gleams, / And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.”
