Enough! Dance!

The ghost of Turgenev crying

“Enough!”

Is in my ears

My activities are glorious

While several seasons

Fighting disease

Living closely with personal existential uncertainty

My body is marked

There is a thin line

Across my left eyelid

A scar from where it was removed

I am tired of this

There is a book

Being written

The first section poems like this

I wonder if it’s my last

I don’t know

All things are possible

So say Shestov and Fondane

Yes, all things are possible

Including the impossibility

Of my writing another book after this

Yes, all things are possible

What is most possible though

For all life

It seems is impossibility

So says the stories found in fossils

Similar to what Camus affirmed at Tipasa

I am surrendering nothing of myself

Whilst ever learning with arduous patience how to live

I prefer Genesis to Exodus or Revelations

Creation and preservation are more desirable to me than salvation and gnosis

I don’t want to be resurrected Carrion reanimated by necromantic forces

But to survive and become new, become different

When Babel falls

The totality collapses

Confusion and diaspora are apparent

Babel has, again, fallen for me

And I find myself in the bewilderness

Fondanean heroism: to admit spiritual defeat and to take courage and persist regardless

I playfully compare myself to Odysseus

With every victory and seemingly easier terrain

There are new challenges, fights and mountains

And Sisyphus

Returning to the existential uncertainty

Of what might grow within me

Is a very similar mountain

Look at this

Athens and Jerusalem

Jerusalem and Athens

Have either really escaped Romanisation and empire?

Camus favoured Athens

Shestov Jerusalem

I can nomadically wander into and between both

Though neither feel like home

And amidst this empire I feel to wander

I am alive

This flesh and body

Here is where wisdom resides

And perhaps lingering disease

What wisdom does a tumour reveal?

What unspeakable mystical awe is to be found in bodily corruptions that threaten the habitats they reside within and cannot survive without?

The awe is one of awfulness

Of violences that language cannot articulate Civilisation and its diseases

What madness, irrationality, absurdity and insanity it is

To consider dance,

Bespaloff’s freedom from history in l’instant,

Goldman’s preference over revolution,

Nietzsche’s means of not losing the day,

A folk medicine practice,

Embraced by many mystics,

As cure for this disease

And how wonderful it is

If only to imagine

Babel falling with a dance of the living

Turgenev’s ghost whispers “enough!” again

Have I written enough

Is dancing enough?

What is possible and what impossibilities does possibility contain, if possiblity is irreducible and potentially infinite – an unspeakable and barely imaginable anarchy of creativity and freedom?

The eternal return to the present and presence and overcoming and life-preservation and freedom/choice/respobsibility/anarchy

I wonder what music there is to hear out in the world

The ghost of Tom Waits singing Martha is in my ears

I am going to festival and see folk, friends, loved ones I’ve not seen for years this weekend

I walk from my house to my car,

About 100 yards,

There is bird song

Tchaikovsky is playing on the classical radio station when I turn my car on

I prefer Chopin and Liszt I can listen to them on the train,

Through my headphones

Dead composers

Somewhat reanimated

Through necromantic technologies

Sat at the train station

The crows cawing is a welcome sound

Remembering the book

I am writing

Remembering Turgenev’s “enough!”

Am I coming to an end with philosophy,

Favouring poetry, stories, music and dance?

Will this be my last book?

The possibility of it being impossible for me to write another book of philosophy,

Of it being no longer possible for me to try at speak the unspeakable as I’ve been speaking,

Feels possible and uncertain

Fondanean heroism is admitting spiritual defeat and continuing with courage regardless

This defeat is not resignation or renunciation

But rebellion and revolt,

Which is life (Libertad’s affirmation)

Metaphysical anarchy

Speaking the unspeakable

Impossibility is possible

“Enough!”

Dance!