Day 1705, looking inside.

Is it possible to imagine a world without time? I don’t think so. You can split up a second a million times, there will still be a moment, that is different than the moment before. Even without the clock there is a movement, you might say it is going forwards. But we cannot measure it like we can do with our place in the universe or our distance to the wall left from us.

Time feels more like a liquid that surrounds you, you can feel it all over you, but you can’t grasp it.

Ripple.

Motionless in time

a surface seems to ripple

I blink and move it.

This poem (Day 783) from a while ago is following more of the rules that define a haiku. I remember the picture that belongs to that day, sailing on a blue sea with ripples everywhere. In those moments time seems to stand still and the seconds that nothing calls for your attention last forever. As if I am “motionless in time”.

I tend to be quite literally when I use my daily picture as an inspiration for my poem, and in this case “a surface seems to ripple” can be taken literally. And the “seems” goes away when I blink my eyes and pay attention once again.

Besides the literal interpretation of the poem, derived from the picture, i like to sneak in a more philosophical meaning. I have a hard time seeing it this time. That is an other thing that time does to a lot of people, it arbitrary eats your past away like the white foam that pops in the wake of a sailboat.

But that’s the thing with art. You look at it, read it or listen to it and you feel that it is good and deep. It feels like looking at a closed door that, if you open it, will show a bright lit world, where you can wonder around forever. I like that part the most, when you crack it open and a little bit of the light begins to shine through… Most of the times its off course just a door to a dark cellar or a light bulb that shines in your face. But you never know and that’s why I keep on seeing, reading and listening.

Day 1704, purpose of it all.

Day's pictures, Philosophy

Assume that there is no purpose in life, our life. Assume that our sun will slowly consume all of it’s fuel and at the end this rock we call earth. Assume that all of this has no purpose and that this being here, there and everywhere is all there is.

If we, thinking human beings don’t exist, would it than matter that life on earth has it’s rhythm of life and death? That the great ape’s go extinct and that the sun sets every evening and is nonetheless not remembered the next day. Are we, thinking and remembering human beings not the ones that give all of this “life” and death purpose, albeit only in our head.

This is a poem I wrote in may 2018, Day 777.

Objects

Without thought things are nothing

with our existence they get a purpose

Our being is their being.

First of all, we all can agree that we are thinking animals (I know, a lot of people don’t think… that.) Other animals might also think but we not only think with our feelings, emotions and instinct but also with words and reasoning. Even the smartest ape hasn’t written a book telling us we are wrong on this subject.

We think and that’s unique, and I thought: why am I thinking about this particular subject, if a call randomly a thousand people and ask what they think about, probably none of them would say to me that they thought about why the chair is a chair. I guess it is my way of knitting the 14^th sweater, it keeps me warm and busy.

Back to the topic of this post: why is a chair a chair. If we wouldn’t be here the chair would just be a miraculously formed combination of metal and plastic. A dog doesn’t see a chair, it sees a nice flat surface raised from the floor where it can sleep safely and warm. It doesn’t say to other dog’s: hey, there is a chair to lie on. No, it says hey, there is a nice flat surface raised from the floor where you can sleep safely and warm. We humans not only create a lot of the things we see, we give it all also a name and with that a specific purpose, for as long as there are humans.

This “purpose” thing does not mean that all of this is for nothing and that it doesn’t matter that the gorilla goes extinct. All of this is created, is given a name and function because we think and that includes our morals and values. We created our morals and values because we think, or maybe better said: because they are a function of us thinking. The gorilla feels a loss when a close one dies, just like we feel it, but we are capable to reflect on the loss and write a poem or music about it. The gorilla morns but we have given what he does a name so we can think about it and value it if others do the same.

Day 1702, circle.

Day's pictures, Philosophy, Poetry

I sometimes blame people for not searching the net for an answer, but I now all to well that I’m to blame to. I realized that once again when I looked at my old poems to find one for today. For several weeks, or moths I was writing haiku’s or so I thought…then one night my girlfriend asked me: are you writing haiku’s? I say: yes, and then she said: you realize that haiku’s have 5-7-5 syllables and not words…

my character, off course blamed her first for not telling me sooner, but that happened internally and I was banging my head, also internally…I think…

The “haiku” is from Day 754

Being a brushstroke and shade’s

deep colors pressures sudden turns fading out

our hunger the blank canvas.

I like what I wanted to say but for the last year or so I like to break the sentences as to emphasizes the words and pauses. Since this isn’t a real haiku, it doesn’t even has a seasonal theme, I can now re write it in the style that I use lately.

Being

a brushstroke and shade’s

~

deep colors

pressures

sudden turns

fading out

~

our hunger

the blank canvas.

Sometimes I read poems from famous poets and feel intimidated by their use of words to describe emotion and other states of mind. English is not my mother tongue but even if I tried in my own languages I would not come close. But I like to try and in this case I wanted to describe our being as “a brushstroke and shade”. Sounds poetic and for me it opens up to a lot of different interpretations, like: we only have one life, or brushstroke and you can swirl it around in different direction and the light will form different shades. You can also go in a straight line and have less shades but you see less and looking back you might get bored by the shape you left…That’s the one that came to my mind now. It is of course not an original story but treating your life as a piece of art entails more than you might think.

The four other lines underneath the first two lines are refinements in the story I just made up, but the last two lines are more mysterious, for me.

Do we hunger for a blank canvas? Is, a nagging feeling of wanting to start over a thing we humans share? You understand by now that I am not looking for answers on question of our daily lives, I want to now what the rails is we ride on and not what the color of the train is.

I realize that wanting to start over entails that you are not satisfied with the live you had, have and live. But it is often mush easier to change the way you look at things and your life then to change it. Realizing that there are not so many things we have control over like accident, diseases, the people we meet or the opportunities we get. You have to conclude that you better find a why to live in piece with these circumstances. Starting over feels like a good idea, if you think that you are in control of what will happen to you. Did you had control over it before?

I was lucky in my life that I got my share of bad luck to try this theory out and I think I came a long way. But this feeling of content that I have is not reached at the end of a line but more a place on a circle close the point where I started, the feeling of despair…expect some interference.

Day 1701, despair.

Day's pictures, Poetry

I like the word being. I am a being and I am being here…that last one didn’t sound right but it makes sense to me. Intrigued I looked it up on the net and quickly realized its a grammatical rabbit hole I can disappear in for ever so I turned around.

In the little poem I wrote the 25 of March 2018 I used the word being.

Day 731, turn.

I drive home and turn

because there is a being over there

I don’t want to be.

When you read it quickly you might think that I mean that there is someone there that I don’t want to be around but its more the circumstance of my life or being that “i don’t want…to be”

I would probably write it differently now but I do this kind of writing every day. It takes me between 15 and 60 minutes to edit a picture, write the poem and post it. I have other things to do to so after I read it a couple of times and I am satisfied I will post it, knowing that I probably want to change it when I read it again a couple of days later. But the main reason I do this is for the brain exercise and not to write the “perfect” poem. I also think that perfection is hard to achieve if not impossible so a time limit might seem random but it probably doesn’t make much of a different, you can also make it worse by staring at it to long.

The pictures I use with the poems are most of the time the inspiration for the poem. This specific picture I took from the driveway to my house looking back at the road I came from. It is the point where I normally turn if I forget something and have to drive back home. I can of course also turn there if I don’t want to go home, something I never did because it was my (and my girlfriend) refuge, a place I longed for during the day.

I like me (as a person) being there but in a broader sense being there and thus also being there in the world can be more problematic. When we feel despair it is often our habit to look for a cause of that nasty feeling. An easy target is the general state of our “being” or life circumstances that are…misaligned. The place we live, the house we have, the friends we see and/or the person we share the bed with. But I don’t like to blame those “domestic” circumstances, I don’t like to blame anything infarct for my feeling of despair, but if I have to it is our “being” as in who we are that is the cause of our desperate feelings.

If I have to give a layman’s reason for why we feel despair as humans and try to find all kind of ways to avoid it, I would say that not so long ago, in our evolution, we still lived in caves with a lot of dangerous things around us. Imagine that you see an angry dog or a spider you don’t know, we now know what the leash around the dogs neck does and we can look on the net and find an answer on the question: is the spider dangerous. Now imagine that all the animals and sounds around you are unknown to you. For thousands of years that person probably hides in the cave and feels disparity caused by the fair of going outside and be eaten alive. This fearful person that hides most of the time would probably survive and reproduce. The hero would die, walking to the angry dog with no leash and touch the venomous spider. After an evolution of millions of years living in fear we now live for a couple of hundred year in relative safety but also still in a cave.

Day 1700, painting.

Day's pictures, Poetry

Inspired by yesterday I opened some more “old” poems, the ones I wrote around three years ago. I don’t remember writing some of them or even care for them any longer but the following one I kinda like.

Are we painting our lives?

Or the frame that cuts off.

Do we choose our colors?

Or the brush that we use.

Because my thinking hasn’t changed mush the past 20 years I can safely say that the explanation of these four lines, that I will give you underneath, is what I wanted to say 3 years ago.

Are we painting our lives? Do you decide what kind of life you live? You might decide what school you go to but have you decided that you are good in math, or that you have an artistic flare so you go to art school? There are many things in our daily lives that you actively choose and some of the decision you think you choose.

Our subconscious mind and animal drift probably share the table with our ego, if they choose the dinner for tonight. You bought the pasta in the store but your subconscious didn’t tell you that he (or she) heard your colleague talk about Italy and the great meals they ate there, the animal in you is probably just hungry in this example. The answer on the question if we paint our own lives is probably: partially, we put some finishing touches here and there but the big pictures is painted (be)for us.

Or the frame that cuts off. If we only “paint our picture partially” than I think that we (our ego or I) play a bigger role in the limits we give our lives. We don’t choose our character and temperament so we can be unwillingly stubborn and don’t take a life altering chance out of spite and thus put “a frame” around our horizon, but we also have the capability of rationalizing our way out of opportunities and limit ourselves that way. Our subconscious and drift can be overruled if it comes to important choices but it’s not always for the better. I think that our rationalized life experiences “paint” the border of our lives as in the decisions we make and the limits we give our selves. How flawed these rationalizations are is an other question.

Do we choose our colors? This is a slight variation of the first line, a habit I have. I like to repeat myself to make sure that I’m understood. Its an irritating habit that is not always appreciated but also something I do unconscious. In this case my unconscious behavior puts a “frame” around my possibility to make friends. I sometimes, in the case I am aware of my behavior, choose the “color” of how veracious I repeat myself.

Or the brush that we use. I guess I repeat myself more then two times…

Day 1699, a word from me.

Day's pictures, Poetry

In March 2016 I decided to reanimate my photography hobby by starting a project to post each day a picture, something nice, not just a snapshot with my phone. That is now 1699 days ago and I am still going strong. Due to my structured mind where I often get lost obsessively I see no end to this streak. I do not take pictures every day any longer but I still edit one of the pictures I take on a weekly basis, it still counts for me. I still enjoy the process and seeing my journey trough the years, not only where I have been but also what kind of pictures I like to take.

Around a thousand days ago I started writing little poems underneath the pictures I posted. First just random ones but soon they where inspired by the photo that I posted. I often wonder why I write these poems (or what you would call them). I never learned it, I have no family or friends that write poems, I don’t know where it is coming from. The only thing that I can think of is that I don’t have the skills and patience to write my thoughts up in I cohesive way. Picking a few words and some short phrases and putting them in some sort of rhythm goes naturally for me. It tells, in my own head, what I want to say and according to some of the reactions, others seem to understand me every now and then, so I guess it means something.

I wrote a thousand of these short poems and this morning I wondered how much I have been repeating myself, not literally but theme wise. My pictures tell something about me but the things I write about even more. In short, I think I want to tell how I see we humans see the world. The illusion we live in to survive, like the brain that filters all the information of our senses and deliver to us what we need at that moment. So is it also with our world view, it fits our needs. That dance with reality is important for our well-being and as someone that dances to I do also realize that my reality can only be partially true. I imagine that if everybody would realize that their world-view is just that, their world-view, we would have no reason to dispute and fight each other. It makes sense to me and I guess writing these little poems is my way of helping…at the least it keeps me saner in an insane world

This one is from two weeks from now a thousand days ago.