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What do you feel when you catch a glance of someone looking at you right in the eye?

Each individual’s gaze carries their own narratives and consequences. There is the gaze of a mother who looks fondly and warmly at their child. There is the look of the lover’s desirous gaze that seeps into your bones. There is the malignant stare of an enemy who carefully watches your every move in order to calculate your demise. But there’s something about the gaze of a stranger. You have no history with this person, but a synchronicitous look can shake one out of their normal fugue. You create connection that you didn’t intend to establish.

His eyes were an oceanic blue and just as deep as the trenches of the ocean floor. On the other hand, his stare induced an infernal anxiety in me. People always say that eyes are the window to the soul, and even as cliché as it is, I can’t disagree. But it also goes in the other direction. His stare flayed me bare; my wounds were painfully exposed in all their abject glory. In his eyes, I couldn’t escape my reflection.

It’s shocking, really. I knew nothing of this person but in that instant this person saw right through me. In that coffee shop, I felt as vulnerable as one could feel. I’m imprisoned in this present moment, locked in with this stranger whose eyes tell me that he knows aspects of myself that I thought were hidden, things that are occluded from others, but not from him.

I didn’t know how to feel in that moment except exposed and uncomfortable. There was nothing particularly creepy about this stranger, but he was like a spectre that appeared to remind me of things that I fear and there are not a lot things that I do fear. But the things that I do fear weigh on me.

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Last night I took a night ride on the interstate between California and Nevada. Usually on these type of rides, I blast music but last night I chose silence for my midnight venture. I put the driver’s window down, letting the night winter air pierce my face. All around there was nothing but endless stretches of sand and sky. It’s as if the sky and the land embraced to become a horizonless black ocean.

Away from civilization, the barren desert sings its midnight melodies. Is it really impoverished when the stars are bright, the moon is full, and you hear ghostly whispers of life? Its poverty requires a subtle ear, you will hear things that you otherwise wouldn’t hear elsewhere; these are sounds that rattle the gut, sounds that resonate in the pit of your stomach. It’s a feeling that’s hard to explain and maybe it should be left unexplained.
Is this the Valley of Poverty and Nothingness that the Baha’i wrote about?

“This is the plane whereon the vestiges of all things (Kullu Shay’) are destroyed in the traveler, and on the horizon of eternity the Divine Face riseth out of the darkness, and the meaning of “All on the earth shall pass away, but the face of thy Lord….” [Qur’án 55:26, 27] is made manifest.” (The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys).

I drove to nowhere except onto the path that led me to that feeling that one only experiences when totally alone. But I wasn’t truly alone. On that long stretch of road, the landscape was beatific in all its unforgiving austerity. The night was bitterly cold and dark with no shelter in sight. All life passed away and in its place was the fecund silence. It was right before dawn when I reached civilization. In the purplish fugue of the early morning, I saw the sun peak over the horizon. Come daytime, the sun beats its overbearing rays; its hot light revitalizes the land and I’ll be long gone when that happens.

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I’m partial to the Spinozan God as a substance with infinite attributes that express an infinite and eternal essence and that’s the cause of itself. It’s the idea that God is identical with the universe, an idea which he encapsulated in the phrase “Deus sive Natura” (‘God or Nature’). In Christianity, God is characterized by three aspects: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Son part being defined by the hypostatic union between Christ’s humanity and his divine nature. All three of these aspects also expressing an infinite and eternal essence. Christian art, with its depictions of Christ and an anthropomorphic God, is one I find interesting. Its intention is to depict God as the underlying substance and as the fundamental reality that supports all else. God is intimately here with us by Christ sharing our humanity in all it’s joys to its most abject condition. God is also all around us and we’re never far away from his providence.

The older I get the more God becomes a factor in my life. I’ve always had the inclination towards the mystical but for a long time, I haven’t been religious. I’ve always been aware of God as a faceless and transpersonal being that aloofly watches over us. He’s all around us but never really with us. My greatest achievement and joy in life will be to experience the numinosity of God; nothing can top that. I remember experiencing Spinoza’s God when I was young. It was no doubt to me that he was the very fabric of the universe, the very fabric of my own being despite my finitude.

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I wonder if I’m meant to live with these devils as I watch you above from the pit of my brimstone. I feel nostalgia for a love that never was. I sometimes think to myself that I crave your ghostly touch and phantom embrace. It’s a love that could never be consummated but I’m content to just send love letters with singed edges. My kisses are smoke signals that choke you and my embrace is as comforting as fresh embers on bare feet. The heaviest burden I carry is that I chose this life and I continue to live and choose this life innumerable times with all its pain and joy and in all its suffering. I don’t regret my decision. Better to find solace here than to rail against God in Heaven.

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They say the beachfront is beautiful. During the day, the sun sets ablaze the excitement of the beachgoers playing and relaxing on the beach. Women tanning themselves and children playing in the sand and water with the innocence of not knowing what goes on further beyond the shoreline. At night, the ambience of the waves is a lullaby. Draped in obsidian dotted with tiny specks of light, the sea and sky embrace in a lover’s sleep, a sleep so peaceful that it appears that the world has approached a standstill. It is in these quiet moments that the earth reveals its true intentions.

The black horizonless sea inspires my imagination to run wild with what horrors and oddities it harbors. Large abandoned shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean. Mega fauna that dwarf these huge shipwrecks, and the further and deeper you go, the weirder and more Lovecraftian the creatures are. And then there’s the Mariana Trench, the Dis of the earth. The ocean is our darkwood: it’s wild, harsh, and impenetrable but instead of it not just being a place where the directionless lose their way, it creates a crisis in disbelief. They say the beachfront is beautiful, but I don’t think they mean beautiful in the same way that I experience it. At night, especially deep into the night when the world sleeps, is when the ocean becomes alive. In the silence of the night, you can vividly hear the waves crashing. Every once in a while you see bioluminescence. You can hear the crew from past ages and their panic as the ship sinks. Yes the beachfront is beautiful but in a terrifyingly sublime way. It’s one of the few things that makes me believe in some higher power, a high power that mocks the hubris of humanity.

The ocean is the last frontier on earth and I think one of the main reasons why we have not conquered it, aside from technological reasons, is because it is the collective vanitas of humanity. We have raped the earth of its resources and with climate change being our impending doom, the ocean waters continue to rise each year. There is a collective unspoken understanding of the otherworldly power of the ocean. It revenges itself against the human ideals of enlightenment, progress, and the mastery over nature, proving them not only irrelevant but it also mocks humanity’s desire to conquer it. It slyly coaxes us into giving into our most vainglory instincts to just in the end swallow us whole, back into the womb of the earth.

I find it telling that the sky is the boundary between the ocean and the endless expanse of space. Both are frontiers filled with endless mystery. The ocean is the chthonic mother and space escapes the confines of the anthropocene and between these two is the Apollonian sky fighting to not have these entities merge to become our oblivion. This is what I mean when I say that the beachfront is beautiful.

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“Vanitas—Still Life with Bouquet and Skull,” by Adriaen van Utrecht, circa 1642.

I open the curtains and a bright light hits my face. I look over to the vanity and the sunlight puts the decayed flowers into full relief. Each crack and crinkle is magnified by 10 times. The bruised purple looks even richer. They almost look alive and radiant in the sunlight. In a million years from now, this light will desist and implode on itself.

There’s the preserved skull of my great-great grandmother on my nightstand. Sometimes she whispers in my dreams faint, cryptic words I can never make out. Words of old world wisdom that only come to be understood in time. Her whispers turn into echoes as they transform the room into a theatre of cosmic drama. What hour is it? The day has only started but the symphony is inching towards it crescendo. The time on the clock is a farce.

I look outside and re-imagine that I’m looking at a garden teaming with life and the libidinal energy of early spring. The artificiality of the city has me imagining artificial landscapes. I dream of virtual life cycles where each sleep is a repetition of the universe recycling itself. In my dreams, I am the mother of universe. I don’t merely witness the repetition, I birth the light that illuminates the decaying flowers. My rays fuse with everything it touches. I reverberate throughout like the whispers that encompass everything.

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I do consider myself a ritualistic person. I desire to recite words that burn the lips. Replicating actions with a disciplined fervor appeals to my obsessive side. I see myself being nostalgic for an era that codified ritual and communion with the forces that undulate our reality. When I look at the night sky, I see an obsidian expanse with specks of light interspersed to break the infinitude. To feel continuity with this is to experience the apex of life. In that obsidian expanse, thousands of stars die every minute. They die as they live, burning brightly until they explode. In the beauty of all of this, there’s mourning for the life that was lost. But in death, there’s joy and liberation when we truly accept that life and death are one in the same.

Ritual condenses the past, present, future and life and death into one point – we only get a fragment of the never ending cycle that spans to infinity. Sure, we have our daily routines that help us get through the day, but routines operate on autopilot, while rituals operate on a clear intentionality and here lies my malaise with modern life. Everything feels flat, without pulse, without blood pumping through the veins. Everything is designed towards sloth and complacency. These criticisms are nothing new but the disdain I feel towards key aspects of modernity intensify as I age. Modernity liquidates any sense of timelessness and continuity. I do love the comforts and privileges that modern technology affords us but there comes a point one must question is change and progress always good? Progress to what and to what end and means? In some ways we live in both the best of times and the worst of times – this is the most advanced human civilization has been but at what cost? At what cost ecologically, economically, and humanistically?

One aspect of modernity that fascinates me is how it numbs us to death. Everything is reduced to its base materiality that even death is atomized and something we don’t deal with until old age. If everything is virtual, what’s there to worry about? Except everything we do is an obsessive prevention of the signs of decay. We exercise, use anti-aging creams, and do plastic surgery to ossify ourselves within a moment where death is beyond catching up with us. Nothing wrong with these things, but at least in North America we have an ethic of hygiene where decay and subversive foreign influences are kept at bay while ironically enough we fester in our own mindless decadence. “Death revenges us against life” said the poet Octavio Paz, it challenges the pretension of life. This is why I admire Mexico’s Day of the Dead – it puts mortality into high relief but in a celebratory and at times mocking way. Life is mourning but death is also a celebration.

To be numb to death is to be numb to life. When I witness that obsidian expanse, I see myself at awe and in terror of the universe. A universe where extreme violence is a metaphysical reality, it’s just the order of things. This is a war universe, as William S. Burroughs would say. At least the one that we inhabit seems to be filled with war and games. It’s also a universe that harbors many numinous mysteries where we’re always discovering its underlying nature and physics. The scientist shares many features with the poet – the universe is a constant unfolding and the scientist can only really ride the waves of this unfolding just as the poet rides the waves of his inspiration. Flowers grow where the blood has been shed, from the womb of earth to the infinite expanse of space, life begins as it simultaneously ends. I don’t want to be numb to this simple fact.

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Our eyes never meet when you look at me. Neither here nor there, like the discarded toy of a child that lies idly on the floor where it was unceremoniously thrown by its owner. No. Not quite. A discarded toy knows its value has been lost once it has been thrown in the trash. A forgotten toy lies in limbo, not knowing when it’ll be be played with or thrown in trash. But even those considerations imparts too much importance onto it. The child doesn’t realize it’s there and the only touch the toy receives are the giant footsteps of the child. So here I look at you, through you, look up to you, like a stalker who’s victim doesn’t know he exists. Your gaze is just a scrape, just a mere touch to remind me that you’re present but my existence is incidental. But even as you look past me, your gaze still carries the weight of those giant footsteps.

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Sun-kissed etchings

Fill the page with its solar excess

Psyche expands into the flesh

Where the word becomes incarnate

Noon day fire incinerate my insides

My blood carries the soul of life

The Spirits have called

To mark the Hour that has come

Boreas casts his breath

My blood freezes

With it the spirit lies in cryostasis

The midnight moon casts its gentle light

As it guides me down the cavernous path

Psyche’s echoes expand into the cave

Reverberating it’s cacophonous cries

Whispers of the dead

And wails of the damned

Encompass

As the silence thickens

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I’ve been a bit preoccupied with infinity especially as it relates to death. These are some themes I’ll be incorporating into my short story. It’s something I’ll attempt to articulate but how could you fully articulate something that’s mostly ineffable?

I remember the nighttime desert roads that we drove on our family trips from California to Las Vegas and vice versa. The only thing illuminating the inky blackness were the headlights. It felt like there was a blanket smothering over me where I felt myself slowly suffocating and contracting under the obsidian dome. When I looked outside the window, all I saw was black, horizonless flatland, and it was both captivating and terrifying. I experienced a primal terror that seeped down to my marrow and viscera. But in all its horror one is stupefied.

The devouring maw of infinitude only gave me a small glimpse of what’s truly out there. What is revealed to me was the fact that I can’t help but cling onto the concept of “me” and “mineness” – even though the self is hard to define personally and ontologically, I still come home to the entity that’s me, a thing that belongs entirely to me. And that sense of me is what carries me through life. But part of the veil of Maya is the belief that self is an entirely separate, permanent thing, but it’s hard to detach from that illusion because it feels like what we do and what happens to us have immeasurable weight.

For a very short period of time, I was into Vampire the Masquerade and was fascinated by a clan called the Tzimisce. They consisted of a vampire clan of serial killers and psychopaths, but also priests and scholars. But the connecting tissue was the desire to transcend their humanity into something far monstrous yet greater than their previous selves. They essentially were the Hellraiser cenobites of that universe. But I deeply connected with that premise especially as it involved body horror and stretching one’s physical and psychological limits. To not be a person, but an entity. Something that’s entirely boundless and inflated.

I think the terror and seduction from those childhood memories still loom over like a spectre. The desire to transcend my humanity seems to reveal both the fear of and draw towards infinitude. To desire to be beyond human is the desire to escape the clutches of death but it also betrays the desire for timelessness as it rejects the impermanence of our being. I myself want to be infinite but I’m unwilling to submit to infinitude itself. I think of the skeletons of dead animals in the desert and how they disintegrate into the sands of time and return to the plenitude of infinitude.