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All posts for the month June, 2013

Nothing is more real than nothing. Beckett Malone Meurt/Malone Dies – 1951

We Are Nobody by Pier Marton

Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be. – Samuel Beckett, Molloy, 1951

The clamor is everywhere: BE SOMEBODY!… but those efforts are illusory. Beyond our names and our affiliations lies the same eternal nobody that we were when we were born – and that we will be when we die. What surrounds us – all the stuff, the concepts… – blinds us and entraps us into a fortress, a coffin. These facts, though, do not constitute any reason to become pessimistic, merely realistic. And freer.

A false sense of self, or is it that any sense of self is false?
Not unlike the Buddhist warning about everything being “maya“- a form of illusion, it is clear that much of what surrounds us (the concepts, the busyness… ) stands on wobbly foundations.
The silence – not the physical type [machines were beeping, announcements and similar activities abounded around me] – a form of beyond-activity spelled out clearly, within a form of silence – that everything was nil.

O vanity of vanities, behind all the “stuff” that surrounds us lies…

… nothing.
And no need to expand much on this.

Either you understand this or you don’t.
More words will not help.

It seems most people have no interest in this type of “information” – it just does not seem to fit anywhere.


About “being nobody” per se, paralleling Kafka’s “I have hardly anything in common with myself ” & “My People! My People! If only I had one,” I would refer you to many others who have expanded on that topic: Guy Debord, Alejandro Jodorowski, U.G. Krishnamurti. Or you can view the recent brilliant film “The Other Son.
Without saying, saving lives is not part of this concern.

CabbageSMLMarton

My cabbage by Pier Marton

Say No To Say Yes

I may have written about this earlier: this was a key moment in my “survival.”
I had tubes in my head, my nose, my throat, my stomach, where else I am not sure anymore… I had been more dead than alive. I could not speak… I could not write… my eyes seemed my only way to connect to the visitors. After being in the I.C.U. for what seemed like an eternity [beware of the myth of that neutral taste of eternity on the Jewish Shabbat -nobody had considered what eternity in hell could be like?!], as another tube was being inserted into me, this time into my throat, I came back to life by shouting a loud and clear: “NO!” –  As if this were a form of re-incarnation (re-entering my body), I came back to a certain sense of self by refusing that tube.
The nurse was shocked, I had been absolutely compliant before… I had surprised myself too.
Was this the same life force that Marceline Loridan-Ivens – who survived the concentrations camps – often speaks of?
Biology of the cells uniting?  Life must be?

My refusal corresponded to some re-investment of my body, and my need to control its boundaries.