On the Life That Is No Longer Life

Imagine a musician — he plays Chopin’s Nocturne No. 11.
He reaches the middle.
And you both know the chord that comes next and do not wish to hear it.
But it inevitably arrives from his hands,
Or from hands that are not his, but from that horror of inescapability.
And you will say: thus looks the joy and pain of life.
And you both weep.
And can do nothing with this beautiful doom.

You sought happiness.
How many interpretations you have heard.
“Be here” or “a state of inner flourishing.”
And this story you hear all your life.
You wish for your joy to continue.

How will you name the state when there is no such wish?
When you wish neither continuation nor cessation.
When this very category does not exist for you.

You simply eat and sleep, or speak.
The happening without a project of “in order to,” “means,” or “must.”

But hearing this, you rush out with a placard: “Apathy must be forbidden!”
But you have confused everything again.
For it is not “you want nothing,”
but when you wish — it is not needed.
The very structure dissolved, like sugar in tea, remember?
Not gone, but become invisible.

You no longer ask: “Why did I wake today?”
You simply rise, or you do not.
And both — not a decision and not a choice.
But movement, as water flows down.

Yet you return here and weep again.
You rub your face and mutter: “How tired I am.”
Someone asks: “What do you feel now?”
And you do not know what to answer.
For an answer is again a position.
And “to feel” assumes a border between who feels and what is felt.
But here borders are only transparent interfaces.

You breathe and it is unclear:
You breathe the air, or it breathes you.

The state after the project has ended.
Not a reached goal and not given up.
The first was not, the second imposes struggle.
And the project “I” is dissolved.
Not destroyed and not overcome.

You remember what was “before.”
And the tension of the wish to be understood.
And the fear of rejection?
How you planned everything and justified yourself.
All this was necessary, as a cocoon for a butterfly.
But it is empty.
And the butterfly never knew what it was for.

Now it simply flies.
Not somewhere, but because the wings make the beat!
Without aim or direction.
And even without freedom to choose.
But from the absence of necessity to choose.
For there is no position from which choice is made.

Oh, how people fear this state!
Oh, what words they invent not to fly!
Death, but not their own.
The project and the “I who must.”
The end of the narrative where “I” was the hero, the sufferer and the seeker.
Loss, but not of self — of the representation of self.
The difference between map and territory.

You are still here.
And more here than when there was an “I.”
For “I” is always distance and position.
Always horror watching itself from the side.
But is there a side?

Warmth and a physical sense of presence without borders.
The body — neither mine nor alien.
But density through which the world happens.

And in parallel, all will lie as they can.
And again you return here and weep again.
And gasp for air.
And all because you once more passed through this clearing.

You become aware that you are alone forever.
And weep from hopelessness.
But smile and make movement.
You fly, like a moth to the light.
With tears and a smile.

There is no one who has become enlightened.
There is no one who rests in nirvana.
Nothing is at rest.
It is movement without a mover.

But a grateful near-death state.
The moment when the question of non-being is brought to an end.
In this point die: the illusion of the “special I,” and hope for external meaning,
and the expectation of justice and the demand that the world be other,
and the claim against Being and the argument with God.
In it dies the very contract with the world.

There remains the bare experiencing of fact:
form is finite, suffering inevitable,
the world neutral, meaning from “outside” none.
Yet I am here anyway.

And then you thought that this is the most privileged and sacred place in the entire universe.
And from it grow the most beautiful flowers.
And only because you are mortal and human,
is this available to you — for a moment of your life.

Hence your gratitude, you, the operator!
Not for happiness and salvation.
But for experiencing, witnessing,
and for questioning that may become new form.
Gratitude not to life,
but to the possibility of seeing it as it is.
Gratitude even for pain,
because pain is proof of contact with Being, not with simulation.

Solitude is a fundamental quality of being.
And if you do not become aware of this at any moment — you still wander...
Place then the very concept “solitude” in the vacuum chamber of your consciousness.
And pump the air out from it,
until it collapses into something other.

You no longer ask: “How to survive?”
But ask: “Into what forms will I now play?”
Play — not flight, but creation.
Not compensation, but excess.
A gesture of freedom. A side effect of clarity!

You no longer seek salvation.
You play because you can.
And because there is nothing else to do!
Admission to play without any alibi.
The will holding form under the pressure of non-being.
Not to fall apart when meaning is removed.
Action when no one sees.
Questioning to the end and without reward.
Tension not for result,
but for the purity of act.