TowW 1 – 10

19.03.2024 - Bereshit
In the beginning, the infinite withdrew to make a space for creation. A void that would be womb to the things that were to become. A place where all that could have been changed into the things that are.
22.04.2024 - The World arises with You
Reiner Maria Rilke gives us the frequent visitors, sleepers in the things that wash their neck and visage in the wells that we only dare assume are there. That effortlessly add their liveliness to what seems full to us in our full lives.

The Kore, the maiden, is that terminal nothingness that makes creation possible. She embodies the non-place from whence we came before we were born and to which ultimately we will return. The parthenogenetic mother of all forms and the promise that everything must eventually again come to end.
29.05.2024 - The Point Above
The girl that is nothing speaks:
"Nothing, nothing, nothing lasts forever."
Like a thread her words spin the everlasting and all-being back and through.
Rough and coarse at first, then ever more fine and refined.
In the heart of nothing a thing is born.
A part yet apart from that which could be anything, that which is everything.
Finally things may become, and what can become is finite.
Because nothing lasts forever.
31.05.2024 - The Point Below
When the Nietzschean looks into the abyss, they realise that in ages past the meaning of everything seemed assured. But where to find it in our modern, secular, scientific society?
You need not be a refined and superior soul to try and overcome the problem of the meaning of life by simply inventing your own. Create your own significance and values by loving your life - no matter what it has in it - and manifest what a life well spent means to you.
Martin Buber relates, that in this way we may truly perform good deeds, not by a religious obligation, but rather ‘an inner sense of morality’. In times of crisis, become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say: “I will help.”
04.06.2024 - Frame of Mind
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Douglas Adams let one character ask himself in his famous 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. Richard Dawkins later used the quote in 'The God Delusion' in his dedication to Adams. Is it enough? It sure is.
Nature is awe inspiring, it needs nothing else.
Is it the only thing that can be? I do not think so. We are homo narrans 'the storytelling human' and we may very well wish to exclaim ourselves: "The fires of dawn ... !" and "The twin suns of Soulianis and Rahm ... !" to spin a story that enraptures and inspires. I think there lies value in that too.
10.06.2024 - A-Part
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” Carl Sagan gave us in "Cosmos," his 1980s mini-series. In the Tanakh the book of Proverbs lets Wisdom exclaim “Before the mountains were settled, Before the hills, was I brought forth; While as yet He had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the beginning of the dust of the world. (...) When He appointed the foundations of the earth; Then I was by Him, as a nursling; And I was daily all delight, Playing before Him, playing in His habitable earth, and my delights are with the children of man.”
Ibn Sina wrote, that as like the flow of water from a source, by virtue of an act of thought, the 'First Principle' is itself intelligence, subject and object of its own intellection.

When we are just babies, we become aware that we are apart from the world a thing onto ourself. When we grow up we learn that we are a part of society and the larger world around us. If we are fortunate, we get to realize, that we are the Universe made conscious. A marvellous, an enormous thing, delighting in looking at itself.
14.06.2024 - Service
“Le client n'a jamais tort,” César Ritz is famously quoted and among other pioneers in hospitality and service, gave us the notion that truly good customer relations treat every complaint in good faith, because the positive experience of most, far outweighs the negative of a few bad actors. But as a few bad apples spoil the barrel, among the people actually having to perform the service, this sentiment fell out of favour far sooner then among their employers ostensibly looking at the bigger picture. And so the unconscionably querulous lead us through qualifications and caveats and exception, exemptions and assumption, to “this is why we can't have nice things.”
The Talmudists teach, that within each person there is at work yetzer hara - an inclination towards evil - which is a vital part of free will. Only a mind capable of evil can choose to be good. This inclination also needs not always be harmful, as lust makes families grow and greed sees enterprise prosper when indulged in moderation. So this dark can never be undone and needs to be conquered and tempered every single time. Thus is our burden for knowing the difference between right and wrong.
Recently Ritz's adage has been tried to be redeemed by intermingling it with the Latin maxim “De gustibus non est disputandum,” broadly meaning you can't account for taste. The new “The customer is always right, in matters of taste” however is neither as useful as Ritz's original nor as succinct as the neoclassical Latin.
20.06.2024 - Lexie
“Toutes les grandes personnes ont d'abord été des enfants. (Mais peu d'entre elles s'en souviennent.)” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry gave us many strong images and ideas in "The little Prince". Among them the notion, that it is a principle power of a child's mind to imagine, to perceive the world freely and to conjure fantasies unperturbed by the learned boundaries of adult life. For Saint-Exupéry, in this capacity to feel with childlike heart, to look with childlike sight, the grand truths of the universe may be approached. The important things, which are beyond the countable and the chartable, the things one cannot own and the things one cannot rule. These things one may only see well with the heart, as they are invisible to the eyes.
The author of Peter Pan, Sir James M. Barrie, in his novel "Tommy and Grizel" wrote “What is genius? It is the power to be a boy again at will.” And true enough, if we are as earnest and without assumption as the little Prince or as carefree and cruel as Peter Pan, if we remember what it was to be a child, we are able see, to feel and to comprehend more fully than those among us who have forgotten.
27.06.2024 - Evil Sorcerer
“He filled his mind with all that he read in them, with enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, torments and other impossible nonsense; and so deeply did he steep his imagination in the belief that all the fanciful stuff he read was true, that to his mind no history of the world was more authentic.”
— The Adventures of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

There truly is madness in reading. That 'staring on marked pieces of tree to hallucinate vividly' as one Katie Oldham has so marvellously put it. And with that madness there comes a flow of power. “I used to like reading and you read enough books and you overflow and then you start writing,” Sir Terry Pratchett said in a lecture addressed to aspiring authors.

Just like that we fill our minds with imaginations, distil them into words and as Prospero commands his airy spirit, as Dr Faustus makes pact with the infernal, so we become ourselves devious sorcerers creating magic.
07.07.2024 - The Ever-Ashen

I think I knew. Even before
first time I drew from ancient lore
but an idea, a shape unclear.

A coiled might, a whispered gleam,
a veiled light, but hushed a sheen,
unearthly near yet not quite here.

I think I felt her warm embrace.
I think I saw her gracious face.

Of all things certain, I know but one.
Behind that curtain I have won,
and even but for doomed a while,
knowing, shining, splendid smile.

— 'The Light behind Shadow, the Presence Divine'

“To poets, insanity seems closer to divinity than death” — Anaïs Nin

Sometimes I think, it is like being infected by a slow fever. Creativity detachment from the mundane in the fulcrum between inception and self-destruction.

The word 'Muse' is hypothesized to derive from a Proto-Indo-European root that means to place or to have in mind. Emotions, desires and ideas incepted to our thought by a divine companion, bicamerally externalized. A voice within, that advises against what seems hard and real and plainly obvious and leads to creation instead-, and counter to-, and regardless of-, even to the point of self-abandon.