Day 1853, starring at myself.
Day 1852, going nowhere.
We wait a lot in life
waiting for a signal to go
~
standing still
with only our mind that tells us
this is the way you go
where you are now
~
where you stand still
Day 1851, the right way.
If there where no markings on the street
or signs showing the way
~
would we still arrive
at the intended destination
Day 1832, down stream.
Full of energy I streamed down to a sea, driven by a need to go.
Halfway my journey, a cold eastern wind sung and gripped me, it took away the light and open sky, a barrier was composed, and a part of me conducted and stayed behind.
That part of me is for always lost, and will collapse the further I move away.
Some of it will follow me, eventually, but I will never know, when I will meet it again.
Day 1824, Daybreak VIII.
Morgenröthe aka Daybreak
Book III
186. BUSINESS MEN. —Your business is your greatest prejudice, it binds you to your locality, your society and your tastes. Diligent in business but lazy in thought, satisfied with your paltriness and with the cloak of duty concealing this contentment: thus you live, and thus you like your children to be.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Day 1823, Daybreak VII.
Morgenröthe aka Daybreak
Book III
182. ROUGH AND READY CONSISTENCY.—People say of a man with great respect, ” He is a character “—that is, when he exhibits a rough and ready consistency, when it is evident even to the dullest eye. But, whenever a more subtle and profound intellect sets itself up and shows consistency in a higher manner, the spectators deny the existence of any character. That is why cunning statesmen usually act their comedy under the cloak of a kind of rough and ready consistency.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Day 1816, duck.
With some
you see from the outside
how the inside is holding
together
without looking
through their open
portholes
~
it’s the brick wall
that supports all that weight
and the cannons
they bear
Day 1789, dilute.
We often have to climb high
and far
away from our pride
~
before we can vent
whats burning
inside
~
and it can help
to stand straight
because appearance
dilutes
Continue reading “Day 1789, dilute.”
Day 1788, windows.
I wander
in my head
~
searching for a view
through a window in the rooms
facing the side
where the sun goes down
~
as if beauty
or the hope of a next day
beholds an answer
Day 1786, bloom.
I landed with my face down
In a cold reality
of dead weeds and earth
~
when I looked up
just in front of me
I saw a gray flower
unopened
~
I wondered
when is the right time to bloom
Day 1785, and far.
I saw the whole sky
and far in the distance
it was beautiful
Day 1782, leaning.
I always lean towards one side
when I visit you
~
it’s not always towards you
Day 1763, dis like.
I have been reading around 800 of my old poems by now. A lot of them make no sense to me without the picture that it belongs to. The one I chose for today is from Day 1576.
Two flowers behind
the window in front of them
while rain and sun play
This one I personally like, even without the picture and meaning. The knowledge that what you like at the moment of creation might be disliked a few moments, hours, day’s, weeks or months later is…sobering. With my writing I have little pretensions, I can’t really judge it so this makes it easier to accept that I might dislike it the next day. I still have a lot to learn and as soon as the money allows it I will hire some online teacher that can give me some pointers.
With my picture taking it is similar, the difference is that I don’t dislike my old pictures, they are just out of fashion. What I mean with that is that I go thru phases, I have periods that I like saturated colors, and other times more muted or black and white. This changes all the time and I always love the faze I am in.
With photography I also don’t mind what others might think of it, with my poetry I would mind. But like photography, poetry is also subjective. There are some rules in photography, but a good photographer can brake those rules and still make it look good. I guess that’s also possible in poetry, but I am still in a phase that I enjoy the process, smile about my own ingenuity, and don’t understand what I was righting about three weeks later.
In the pictures below you can see that i like to get close to the things that are interesting, and hardly ever get seen.
Day 1752, tired.
I live in Trondheim, a normal city in the middle of Norway. If you look at the map you will see that it is only 600km from the polar circle, around the same height as Fairbanks in the middle of Alaska. We have more of a sea climate here so it is not as cold as in Fairbanks, today it was -13. The thing that is strange here, something I am used to, but also not. It is the lack of sunlight. The first ten years in Norway I lived above the polar circle , and there you have some light between 10:00 and 13:00, but we didn’t see the sun for almost two moths. Here in Trondheim we have more daylight, but because I am at work during the day I can only see the sun in the weekends. I think there is a reason why people that live in the North are more mellow, specially compared with the more vibrant people that live closer to the equator. This is just a long way of telling you that today, at the end of the week, I am pretty tired and monotone.
Today I am not gonna write about one of my old poems. When I have little inspiration I will pick one of the books from Friedrich Nietzsche and pick a random aphorism and let my brain chew on that for a while. You can see that I have a separate tab on my blog about Nietzsche. He is not the only philosopher I like to read, but he is the one that spoke to me the most. People sometimes ask me what I like about him, and I have to admit that I have a hard time explaining it, specially when the person that ask me knows only little about philosophy. The problem is that there are no philosophers that stand alone and isolated in history. Every thinker, scientist or inventor stands on the shoulders of his or her predecessors. Nietzsche is one of the first philosophers who also was a psychologist, he is really good in dissecting the mind and pointing at the reasons why we do the things we do. But giving this as a reason is only half the story because attached to Nietzsche are all these predecessors and the people that came after him. Nietzsche is the spill in my world of philosophy, and the spill is important but so is the rest around it.
There are a lot of things we know better now, then before. I rather go to the doctor now then 2000 years ago, the same goes for traveling or just living in a house. All these things have improved over the years. What Nietzsche, off course, talks about, are the so called thinkers and moralizers. If you just pickup a book about the history of philosophy, you will soon realize that the Greek, 2500 years ago, already where walking in the direction we are still going. Around that time there where also other places around the world where people started to think about, and explain the world. Because I am born in the so called west, I recognize more in what the ancient Greek where writing back then then I do with what the thinkers from India or China wrote for instance. You can read text from Greek philosophers that are so modern, that a lot of people today would have problems agreeing with it, because it is to progressive.
We live in modern times but the barbarians are still among us, some are even rulers.
Day 1751, looking back, forwards.
In 2016 I came back from a visit to my parents in law in America. My girlfriend is African American* so we were extra exited by what’s going to happen, specially if T…p would win. When we came back at the end of September we anxiously waited till the election where over. It was off course a big disappointment. The good thing is that I started this blog. I already had an other place where I posted my daily pictures and now I wanted a blog again to vent on. I made a whole series of photoshopped pictures of the situation in America and wrote about it. Now it is almost over, I wanted to wait with it but after what happened last night I might as well post it now. I re-upload most of the pictures I made in 2016, and I will tell something about it. I was hoping back then that the readers would understand the pictures, including all the details, but that didn’t happen.
*I asked my girlfriend if I could still use these words to describe her…mistake;-)
Day 1740, 500 words.
There is theory, and practice. In theory I probably know more about human behavior then the average person. And that’s not bragging, average just mean that I share a place with 3 to 4 billion people, but modesty is also a vice.
I think that by the time I left my parents house, out of that bubble into a bigger one, that I started to look away from my navel and into the world. Moving from a small village to a big city, and later, joining the Marines. Around that moment I started to see the people around me as characters, characters with there own little traits and colors. Like cars, there are thousands of them, but you can separate them into kinds, brands, worn-out, or brand new. I didn’t just see unique individuals, but also all the similarities. I was intrigued, but either I didn’t know how to ask, or no one had a clue what I was talking about. It felt like I was the only one seeing this, and asking these questions.
I was just interested in how this all, being here, on this rock, works. I just turned eighteen and life lived me for another 5 or 6 years, till one day I walked into a bookstore. It just happened to be that I lived close to a place in Holland, it is called Deventer, and they have, or had, once a year the biggest open air bookmarket in Europe, and because of that there where dozens of book antiquarians located in the city. It was not hard to find a nice bookstore and look around. I remember vividly that I didn’t look at all the so called “self help books” where people offer answers to life’s questions. I had seen enough of the world by then to realize that a lot of people proclaim to have the answers to life’s questions, but how can you have a thousand different answers to that one question? I learned early on that if you read a book about life and you walk away with answers, you have read the wrong book. A good book leaves you with maybe one or two hints to an answer, but many more questions.
Something was not right so I walked past the 5 or 6 bookcases full with these questionable self help books to the one bookcases where I saw two shelves with books about philosophy. I new about philosophy, but I am also a visual person, and the quiet book covers, without bold statements, told me that these books didn’t need to lie to me, to be sold. I still remember one of my first books, it’s a Dutch book wherein several philosophers write about the place where reason goes over into…unreason.
I try not to write more then 500 words every night and I am getting there, but I am still far away from my point… The poem I chose for today was from Day 1226, written in August 2019.
Shadows sometimes stay behind
when you leave
I wanted to write a few words about why I am so busy with this stuff and then give some insights about the poem I wrote. I will keep it short: have you ever left a room full of people, and a few hours, or minutes, later you start to wonder what kind of impression you left behind. Your deceitful mind plays a trick on you, and misremembers the conversations you had, and you wonder if that stain was there all along. That’s the shadow that stay’s behind, and clouds the past.
