In Lovely Blueness

One can no more translate thought than one can translate a poem. At best, one can paraphrase it. As soon as one attempts a literal translation, everything is transformed.

Said Heidegger.

All my thoughts are mistranslations, then.

When I wrote that the world has become a dystopic, ecological disaster overrun by cybernetic zombies and ham-fisted nihilistic tech giants, what I really meant to say was the world is as it has always been, a round ball of rock with a core of nickel-iron alloy encased in a membrane of molten liquid metal.

And that’s what you call a poem. It’s cold. Like spending the night on the roof of a building with a homeless man. Let’s call him Hölderlin. Friedrich Hölderlin. And buy him a coffee.

Sometimes, to talk about something, you must not talk about it. Is it death sitting on that stool over there? Or just a stool with no one sitting on it? It remains suspended in a fiction no one is willing to fill. And yet, a question remains. What do we do when the cemetery is full?

Life is preoccupation with itself. When that ceases, we watch the drift of clouds. See what they do. What they don’t do. What they don’t do is worry. What they do do is rain. Thunder. Spit lightning. Get the ground good and muddy. Bead window panes with crazy patterns. Slow glide of a drop of rain zigzagging downward in tremors of jeweled gravity.

Like a calligraphy of water.

Show me a philosophy, and I’ll show you a contradiction.

I’m lying. Nobody goes to that restaurant because it’s crowded.

If this isn’t a philosophy, it must be philosophical to say so, and stand upside down in an upright position, spinning my assertions in a hippodrome of doubt.

Epistemic luck: reasoning, from false premises, that a belief is true, and is true, coincidentally. I look at a broken clock stuck at noon precisely at noon, see it is noon, and assume the clock is functioning. It’s a bit like confirmation bias, but without the narcissism and arrogance.

Luck is tricky. Notoriously undependable. Fortunately for me, I don’t have luck. I have pessimism. Schopenhauer. Emil Cioran. Albert Camus. A history of vertigo, continuous beserker outflow, and a murder of crows that follow me everywhere. 

Particles creating awareness blows my mind. Intense blue lights on a weeping sequoia. Swanson’s Nursery, December 5^th, 2025. Huge goldfish in a small pond, fins in graceful undulations. Like the movement of thoughts in a bowl of mind.

When I was a kid, eight or nine, a souvenir was something fun. A rubber dinosaur. A triceratops or tyrannosaurus Rex. I learned the word in French. Something – quelque chose – came – venait – à la mémoire – to the memory. Something entered into my memory. Which is a place of reflection. For the sake of building a history. A bildungsroman. For endless rumination. For ghosts. For people who were gone before I could finish our conversation.

Where do they go?

Terence McKenna’s experiments with DMT fascinate me. He describes the DMT state as an initiation into a nearby dimension that is frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to imagine, theorizing that the beings he met - diminutive beings he called self-transforming machine elves or fractal entities, ancestor souls communicating from beyond death, self-dribbling Faberge eggs crafted from luminescent superconducting ceramics and liquid crystal gels - are benign spirits offering reassurance about the afterlife to ease anxiety over mortality.

I don’t think I could handle DMT. It takes a special kind of trust in the universe to travel that far into other dimensions, with the expectation of coming back in one piece. McKenna was the ultimate voyageur. The Philippe Petit of consciousness.

I did think, however, his exaltation of computers was wildly off the mark.

Hölderlin offers a more serene vision of altitude and consciousness:

     Like the stamen inside a flower
     The steeple stands in lovely blue
     And the day unfolds around its needle;

     The flock of swallows that circles the steeple
     Flies there each day through the same blue air
     That carries their cries from me to you;

     We know how high the sun is now
     As long as the roof of the steeple glows,
     The roof that's covered with sheets of tin;

     Up there in the wind, where the wind is not
     Turning the vane of the weathercock,
     The weathercock silently crows in the wind.

The poem is called In Lovely Blueness. In lieblicher Bläue, in German.

I’ve been thinking about these lines all day. The first line of the last stanza especially: up there in the wind, where the wind is not. I’m reminded of riding in a hot air balloon. The wind is carrying you along, but you can hold a candle without the flame going out, because you’re in the wind that is carrying you along. It’s not passing over you. You’re in it. Immersed. Enveloped. Your being and the being of the wind, manifestations of life, are one and the same consciousness.