From time to time a poem

This is not the only Game in which these pieces are present, nor is it the only one to which they present themselves. It is however the only one into which they can be present in others at the same time as in Your time. The playing field extends before you, and for you. For you and for the Other.

You take a long, deep breath – the fresh air fills your lungs and all of your being with courage. The Game will begin soon. You recognise at least the novelty of the match. They are frequent; they blend into one another in such a way as that sometimes you have the impression that one Game has only ended from the moment you find that another has certainly already been in progress for an uncertain time. The time of the Game is never agreed upon beforehand. It lasts as long as it lasts …

The pieces are light and dark. Sometimes they change tones. A light piece becomes dark without you seeing it darken. Sometimes a dark piece lightens, but this seems to happen much more rarely. The change in tone is, in all cases, an effect of its movement – the piece well or badly played finds itself surrounded by other pieces, friendly or adverse, all equal (more or less), they are also in apparently random mutation. There are several thousand rules; one can only respect them by fair trangressions of them. When you hardly think about it, the Game is complicated. If you think about it, it is even more so.

Over time, you have become accustomed to its enigmas. The happenstance events of the Game almost never shock you anymore. Or rather, the shock has become habit. What motivates the Game is its dynamic. You place your pieces, they move by themselves. You watch the Game unfold not only as player, but also in the role of a spectator. You are a player, and you are played by the Game. You are played by your strategy and by that of the Other. You are played by the Other, and he by you.

He is the only constant, he is the Other. You have been playing against and with him for Eternity. You have been played by him for as long. You know one intimately, so much so that you are strangers to one another. You cannot resist one another; your mutual resemblance proves to be a gravity well in which you both orbit perpetually around the barycentre of the Game. You play to pass the time, in order to not annihilate yourselves, so much you love each the other. So much you both love the Game. You love the Game because it lets you hate one another, and you love to hate one another. The Game becomes your only value. The Game becomes existence …

So, you find yourself, again and for always, facing him, the Other. You ask yourself to what deceptions will he resort to meet his objectives. You try in vain to know what his objectives in fact are. His only goal which is certain is your defeat. His pieces darken and darken yours. His Game is cruel, you feel, and his only ideal, and that since the dawn of time, is to win.

Therein lies the difference. There are two players: the one who want to win, and the other who wants only for the Game to be good.

It is ironic, you believe, that the Game can be good beyond victory, beyond loss. Win or lose, insomuch as you have played well, you could be satisfied. The Game satisfies its own needs. All you have to do is place the pieces. As always, they move by themselves. But they all desire advancement and to stay in the Game, whether or not they know they have been placed, whether or not they know they are being played.

The Game is precious, as is every playing piece. You love your pieces; each of them exceptionally beautiful. You desire above all to take care of them. You talk to them. You tell them sometimes about the Game, but never about the Other. They cannot know against nor with whom do you play. That, they would never understand. But that understanding is hardly essential to their well-being. It is really better that they do not know.

While placing your pieces, you do not recognise them as pawn or Queen. You cannot know if they are stones, bones or other tokens. Nor if they are Spades, Diamonds or Hearts. You never know if it is a Jack or a Joker. You cannot tell, at first whether they are light or dark. This knowledge comes during the course of the Game. But when they change colour, they can change their roles as well. A light Hearted Jack can become a dark Joker. The bright and shining Queen can make herself a pawn, right before becoming rubbish. The Joker stays a Joker, light and dark alike, yet the lighter he is, the less important the risk of darkening. Herein is yet another beautiful irony …

The Game starts. You smile as a calm anxiety possesses you –

“I know only how to Love, and Love is the desire to do good.” asserted Socrates they say. This is how the Game is played. What is “good” ? What is “to do good” ? What is the best way of knowing ? It all comes back to the same thing: the Game. Love is much easier in a good Game because victory does not matter so much. Neither does losing …

Yet on the side of the Other, who desires to win, nothing less than victory is acceptable. He places his pieces insidiously. He appreciates them because they are useful to his hidden agendas, but does he love them ? It is a good question … To him, the Game board, with its light and dark regions, is but a battlefield. For him, to lose is unthinkable.

He has certainly already suffered much loss. You know him better than anyone and everyone. His losses have filled him with hatred, and just as it is your Love that guides your Game, it is his Hate from which comes all his strength and ability. And you deal with it. You love him in order to hate him, and by hating him, you love him all the more deeply. On the contrary, he loves you because you hate him, for he cannot accept anyone's Love any more than he can accept loss.

One must reserve pity for the pathetic. As such, you cannot feel pity for him. He creates it for himself according to the rules of the Game, but you cannot. You hate him with your understanding, with your compassion and with your patience. You hate him with your tolerance for his hatred and his thirst for victory. You hate him with your respect for the Game, and given that when the Game is good, sometimes you win. And when you win, he hates you so very much more.

His Game then becomes more deceitful, more manipulative and evermore brutal. He plays his pieces as were they only tokens or stones and not the marvellously human hand-crafted works of art, worn only by time and multiple Games. He places them, he removes them. He manipulates his pieces, and if they do not win for him, he tortures them with guilt. It is difficult for you to watch as he does this, so very beautiful are each of the pieces. His pieces change colour often under his hand, certainly in tone, from light to dark, lighting again as yours darken – though they are always somewhat more tarnished than at the beginning.

Turn after turn, your grand manoeuvres are accomplished with your delicate pieces. The wear from the multiplicity of challenges is seen from day to day, from second to century. All they would need to shine again is a little warmth and to be caressed with a soft, clean cloth, a little maintenance during a period of rest. You find it difficult to recover the pieces he has taken, and he doesn't even bother to try to recover his. At any rate, the pieces taken in the Game never leave the board, except when they are broken. For as old and damaged as they become, they can only cover themselves during a short time-out …

You ask yourself from time to time why do you play the Game ? The answer doesn't come easily. The answer may not even exist. One knows his leisure, just as one knows his duty, but one cannot see what is instinct. Instinct is like culture. Try explaining what is water to a fish, it's impossible. You play the Game because it is your element. Outside of the Game, you are nothing. It is vital to you. It forms you now as much as it created you in the beginning. Your beginning. You cannot remember the first time you played. There was no ceremony, no rite of passage, no access in particular. You started playing because that is simply what you do. You remember quite clearly the opponent, the Other, young, fresh, naïve, almost innocent …

The pieces stay innocent, no matter the Game, and whether or not the Game is good or not. It could be a King, gone wild for his placement near a Castle majestically malicious, or a clear Joker brightened by an already light pawn, the pieces move themselves in reference to the competencies of the players. The pieces create and enlarge this reference. It otherwise doesn't exist, except by and for them. You love your pieces and you devote yourself to their good placement. You then expect nothing from them but that they move themselves as well as they can given the role, the colour and tone which they will have at the moment of their turn. You recognise the limits of your pieces. You only expect them to be such as they truly are.

The Other is not so clement. He modifies the behaviour of his pieces to conform to his desires. He already expects that their weaknesses will change them from one role to another, below or beyond their abilities. He counts on their suffering to drive them into power plays where otherwise tenderness would suffice. It is not enough for him to recognise the limits of his pieces, he exploits them. His pieces do not know innocence, they only know the shame and guilt of all their prior losses, those of the Other, but perceived as their own personal failures. They do not even know the player behind the Game. They do not see the Game in which they move. For them, the reference closes in on them. They change not only role and colour, but also composition with the passage of time. They get heavier, and when the Other can no longer manipulate them as he wishes, he throws them away.

And so marches on the Game, play after play, counter-move after move. The honesty of deception gets confused with the effect of success or failure in deceit. Such is the Game … As the pieces change colour, form and most certainly location, you confront the perversity of the Other, always facing you, the look and the mind sharp as those of an eagle and ready to strike you down if you allow him to notice, through inattention or some lack of candour, the most minor imperfection.

And imperfections, you have them, more than you know …

… especially the Love you feel for your pieces. They call out to you, you answer. You must answer, not knowing how long they will appear by their current, very temporary colour, form or placement. You hesitate, you trip over a sensitivity, over a memory or over a fortuitous intuition. The Other sees it. The Game, good or not, takes a bad turn. In seconds which each last a lifetime, you witness the taking of a piece which you particularly admire. You try to save whatever remains by a more philanthropic strategy, but the principal actor is no more – or is at least no longer of your colour, your form. The Other took him.

The Game, good or not, is over. The pieces, moving themselves, move themselves away. Your defeat surprises you; you had not seen the precision of the Other's calculations, but he had surely seen his chance. With one quite graceless, merciless manoeuvre, he seized his victory so coveted. Smiling at you from the depths of his conceit, he mocks you and your fatal error.

Fair player, you only wanted a good Game, not necessarily victory. As it were, you had neither. Your sorrow, born in the most secret chamber of your entrails, ignites. Your beautiful pieces having been deformed, discoloured and so very, very disgraced before your eyes, accuse you of vehement treachery, voluntary or not. All the Love that you had given them before the shock of an incontestable defeat transforms you, in one severely savage moment, into the thing the most miserable in their confused and consternated esteem.

They lament. Their tears erupt from festering wounds as the Other laughs beguilingly and savours all the misery he found the force to inflict. He not only won the Game, but humiliated you to the highest level. You leave from where you were, from where you had played, from where you were beaten. You leave your pieces behind – those you had loved so much – injured, broken and full of bitterness. You leave all that behind in order to cover another field, another arena. You abandon all that was for another fare elsewhere, somewhere good. You depart from your Game and exit.

Outside, it is raining buckets, if not barrels. Inside also. The sky, as dark as your abandoned pieces, as dark as the contrast between your soul of midnight blue against the sky-blue covering of your placement, ruptures and evacuates itself of all its humid heaviness. The steel and concrete coloured sky presses down on you with its illuminating reflections and thunderous explanations. The train in which you are travelling passes near the edge of a wood. You find yourself alone in the car. The trees proudly stand in attention all along this stretch of railway, their foliage undulating as a sea of shadow and stone, pious before the rain and wind. By and in the window at the other side of the car, you perceive, outside and in, a fatal image too familiar to not notice. A solitary weeping willow, weeping alone, bending under the blasts of the storm, bowing before Life. Its tears cleanse your eyes, and you clearly visualise across blood and sweat the mocking face that laughs, that taunts you, that has never left you for a single instant. Your reflection upon vision of the weeping willow, all comes together as One and in the voice of the Other, you speak to yourself again the first words since your failure : a round of Game ?you suggest …

One piece, almost forgotten, you possess still and for always. It is in good form, yet beautiful and even more polished from excessive use. It never leaves you either. As is your nature, you take this piece and place it on a black space. It is neither a Queen nor a Jack nor a Joker. It assures a good Game. Its name is Hope.

The Other smiles to you again from both sides of the window. The weeping willow is behind and in the rain of another landscape; you project an elsewhere – a good elsewhere – upon the horizon. Looking ahead, the Other places his first piece in front of your Hope. He waits ...

“Tell me what you can remember ...”

“Tell me what you can remember ...”

Alexandre Orion
janvier 2012

Beware the Love that shines
Too brightly in the Eye,
Casting shadows 'round one finds
Sometimes Error,
Sometimes a Lie …

(345-346) Help me out of ever-after …

(351-352) Lead me out of this Samsara7...

(357-358) Help me break these chains that bind me …

(363-364) To ambition that confines me/defines me …

(369-370) Help me to find my Pleroma9...

(375-376) Lift me out of ever-after …

1 “Why ?” has been referred to as the quintessential existential question
2 Sanskrit : 'blissful place'
3 Storytelling, Christian Salmon, Ed. La Découverte, Paris 2007
4 In reference to Queen Dido de Carthage
5 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
6 In Buddhism, the assaults of Mara ; in Christianity, the temptations of Christ as revealed in the Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark & St. Luke
7 Sanskrit : of that which circulates, the states of existence under the influence of suffering, from attachment to ignorance. These are the states conditioned by "karma".
8 Hindu god of war, storms and rain -- Rig-Veda
9 Greek : πλήρωμα – the totality of divine power, spiritual fulfilment
10 Proverbs, 16:18
11 Genesis Ch. 3 & Platon, The Republic, Book VII
12 e.g. the Promethean myth
13 the myth of Jason of Argos
14 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Acte I, Scène I

What Is becomes Was one grain at a Time,
Love and Fear dance this macabre pantomime,
Tears of the Dagger, Blood stains on the Cloak,
And screams heard in Heaven through Rising Smoke ~

You wake into the comfortable blackness of nowhere. The perception has no name, and the obscurity is not observed as such. You look in every sense, and this with all of your senses ; in this great nothingness all is bright, the absence of light illuminating all in which you have ever wanted to believe yet just simply could not. The total vacuum is totally breathable, the absolute zero is absolutely ardent and the deafening silence, a symphony of varying rhythms, of crescendo and soft melody. With the same sight, you witness atoms and entire galaxies, and from it all comes the most profound and complete experience of Love that you have always forgotten ...



***



Love is as prolific in the universe as is Life. Every form of life is fully endowed with it. Yet, curiously, it is the gift with which you hurt yourself the most grievously ...



He is there, sitting in front of you. You do not know one another. In of all his expressions however, as in all of his gestures, there is a familiar element. Sometimes you know what he will say before he says it, and sometimes you know what he wanted to say although he didn't anything. It is reciprocal. You find this disconcerting, even troublesome. There's nothing that you want to call attraction – only wonder. You ask yourself : “From what is he made, this strange creature ?”



As every time that this mysterious sentiment intervenes in life, it is toward a person completely ordinary to the eyes of others, but magnificent to yours. Typically, it is for a being who does absolutely nothing to be noticed, who has nothing extraordinary in his behaviour. Nevertheless, there is something singular, unique and incomparably fabulous.



Your friends, with whom you speak of these emerging sentiments, offer you diverse counsel, saying that you should certainly talk to him about your feelings, or, on the contrary, that you should definitely not. Yet none of them believe that it would be a good relationship. He is too old or too young. He's gay or he's straight. He's not of your social class or he's not of your educational or economic level. Sometimes it's that he's too introverted or too extroverted. It's a futile endeavour as he's this or not that … And still, you love him. You did not decide to fall in Love. You very bitterly discovered that you were.



“Love is difficult,” you tell yourself. This is completely untrue. Love is the simplest of all enterprises. So-called love relationships, on the other hand, are the hardest of affairs. When Love settles into a life, you cannot say that it is because of or by the grace of one or the other. You do not love for any particular reason. Reason has no effect on Love, nor has it any consequence. Moreover, Reason has been the mortal enemy of Love for millennia. She most often wins their battles…



You try to be, or to remain, reasonable. You remind yourself that your friends are trustworthy, logical, intelligent and experienced and that they are looking out for your best interest. You try to think of other things, to occupy yourself differently until such a time as this foolishness passes, until it withers away and dies. You go for relaxing week-ends in the countryside with your friends, and go out to pass time having cocktails on sunny terraces. You cannot however stop thinking of that cursed One you adore. All of the songs they play in the pub or broadcast on the radio serenade him. Somehow absent, he's always there. You talk to him throughout light-years ...



You try and rationalise it, reflecting on all of the inconvenience that a relationship with this person would present. You find that you can do nothing about it. You think of him from the second you open your eyes in the morning to the very moment you go to sleep at night, if you can sleep at all. Even your dreams he invades, raising them to paradises from which you wish to never return or plunging them into nightmares from which you cannot break free. “How much time have I already lived without him, after all ?, you scream inwardly, This should not be like this ...”



But it is.



Your intuition comes to the rescue. “How many times have I already lived with this Soul ?” Such strong sentiments do not flow out of dried up springs. Where is the source ? When Love fixes itself into a heart, this proves to be a most resistant installation, and dislodging it is as arduous a task as any of the Herculean labours. Could it be that there's another phenomenon operating herein ? What is there to fear in the state of Love ?



Feelings need no action. They are not events which require response or recompense. They are only feelings. To feel Love for someone is one of the strongest. It is magical and marvellous. To love someone for no reason, no particular attraction, no hope of specific or personal gain is a godly exploit. In this manner, you touch the divine. But this is also why Love hurts so badly ...



Perfection is hardly lovable. You love what is imperfect. You imagine Life with the One you cherish, according to all the conventions of romantic Love, and you attach these images to your sentiment. Thus bound, Love, the most abundant, creative lightness of this universe, becomes a heavy and painful burden. You drag it about everywhere, and with every song, every image, you load it down more and more. You weep, you complain, you brood and then the One you love comes near and all that affliction disappears. It only takes a word, a message, for all your fear to transform into joy. You are in Love and everything is fine.



From one second to the following, everything has changed, everything has become brilliant. You desire nothing more than to be with him, to talk with him, to take nourishment and to breath with him. All of Life is connected to him. You lose yourself adoringly in his simplest, briefest glance. Every syllable he pronounces is nothing other than an angelic orchestra propelling you toward castles in the clouds. And regardless of the opinions of others, your only wish is to blend your soul with his, now and forever.



***



As you are walking in one of the streets of the city, you cross along your path an elderly couple of a nearby neighbourhood. They are holding hands. They are speaking as they slowly make their way home. They laugh. As they come close to you, you recognise the youth in the regard of one to the other, the consideration and the respect which have survived through decades of bitter-sweet togetherness – and the Love they have shared for all of a human lifetime. You feel your desire to live that with the One you love, to grow old in the company of he who you cherish so very much.



Then, as is the sight of the guillotine in the eyes of the condemned, you recall the most morbid truth which has always confronted such a beautiful image : your immortality. You will never be able to grow old with one you love in that way without having to see, by the force of fleeting years, the flower of his youth plucked, withered and dried up of all organic Life. You will never be able to share the castles so shiningly sung into being before he comes up to them by his own evolution. You cannot blend your soul with his without causing him unspeakable harm, your tyranny of Heaven, his blissful Hell. He is too old, or too young or just simply not on the same level of existence. But still you love him ...



... and so you lament. You empty all your essence by exhalations of long and salty sighs convulsing from the very foundation of your eternal being. With every eruption of your tears and blood and the primaeval waters spattering down into the dirty street where you weep in the most pathetic isolation, a star burns out, a world collapses and ubiquitous, imperishable Life envelopes you in her arms of infinite renewal. You can only love him from afar, and the farther away the better. Forever he will feel your beneficence and your protection, and this until he can come to you in another Life. And with this promise, your heart willingly whispers its final murmur and the World around you disappears.



***


You wake into the comfortable pure white of everywhere. The perception has no name, and the nebulosity is no great mystery. You look in every sense, and this with all of your senses ; in this great Evermore, all is light, the absence of shadow explaining all in which you have ever believed yet just simply could not clarify. This totality is tangible, the living warmth absolute and comforting & the symphony of variant rhythms, by crescendo and soft melody, has forever and always been your castles in the clouds. With the same sight, you see atoms and entire galaxies, and from it all comes the most profound and complete experience of Love that you will never, never forget ...

Where the Hell is Paradise, when Heaven goes to Hell ?
Drinking doesn't stop my thinking, I just don't think very well ;
Every train's a prison and every bar's a cell,
When all you've got is freedom, the heart's an empty shell.