Truth: Pure And Uncut
Boleyn (Self Portrait), Shaman Series, 2012
©Kalliope Amorphous
I have been blessed to be exposed to and to receive many of the works of E.M Cioran this week. I cannot articulate the profound sensation of “coming home” that his words have pressed into my skin. I have read each page, not with my eyes, but from behind them and stretching out in all directions. Whoever would dare speak of enlightenment or of Truth without embracing what he has articulated is a heretic of the Void; a traitor to the terrestrial play and all that stirs beyond it.
What he has encompassed in his houses of words is the totality of all of my doings and undoings, my relationships to everything and nothing, the reasons and absences of reason for all which sustains me. Cioran speaks from the teeth that bite the tongue as it speaks, drawing the blood which paints the throat with life and the absence of it.
The universal view melts things into a blur, and the man who still makes them out, being neither their friend nor their enemy, bears in himself a wax heart which indiscriminately takes the form of objects and beings. His pity is addressed to . . . existence, and his charity is that of doubt and not that of love; a skeptical charity, consequence of knowledge, which excuses all anomalies. But the man who takes sides, who lives in the folly of decision and choice, is never charitable; incapable of comprehending all points of view, confined in the horizon of his desires and his principles, he plunges into a hypnosis of the finite. This is because creatures flourish only by turning their backs on the universal . . . To be something—unconditional—-is always a form of madness from which life—flower of fixed idea—frees itself only to fade.
Torn from the goal, from all goals, I retain, of my desires and my displeasures, only their formulas. Having resisted the temptation to conclude, I have overcome the mind, as I have overcome life itself by the horror of looking for an answer to it.
Nobility is only in the negation of existence, in a smile that surveys annihilated landscapes. Once I had a self; now I am no more than an object .. . I gorge myself on all the drugs of solitude; those of the world were too weak to make me forget it. Having killed the prophet in me, how could I still have a place among men?
-E.M Cioran, A History Of Decay (excerpts)
” understood the non-sense of every gesture, every effort . . . . I wanted to defend myself against all men, react against their madness, discover its source; I listened and I saw – and I was afraid: afraid of acting for the same reasons or for any reason, of believing in the same phantoms or in any other phantom, of letting myself be intoxicated in the same way or in any other way; afraid, finally, of sharing a common delirium and expiring in a crowd of ecstasies . . . . It is troubling to think that . . . all sink into lying because they do not suspect the equivalence, in nullity, of pleasures and of truths.”
February 9, 2013 at 2:17 pm
Cioran is great, an often overlooked philosopher …
February 11, 2013 at 3:51 pm