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Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
i.

for the past few weeks i've been doing an experiment,
thankfully philosophy allows such things,
of course, they're deviations from what i'm used to
in chemistry, they're less, what's the word?
spectacular - but they are nonetheless experiments,
and that's the beauty of being grounded in some sort
of science (trinity of biology, chemistry and physics
and that's the limit, beyond this there are only
pseudo-sciences)... medicine? that's the tsarina of
learning: like any tsarina: gets down and *****,
and yes: mathematics is the genteel queen.
philosophy on the other hand seems like a vagabond
in learning, never really pieced together,
never really sentenced to a single direction:
and for that matter, thought can become less narration
that stretches into the sort of philosophy that Sartre
embodied with his novel, and more into thought becoming
experimental...
you might be wondering what the experiment consisted
of... well, over the weeks i've been sadistic unto myself,
it's to do with trying to figure out the modern curse
that's the 3D's: debt, depression, dementia.
                i can't fall asleep without a bottle of whiskey
cigarettes, sleeping pills and music playing in the background:
which would make me a terrible partner, anyway.
   beyond that though, for weeks i repeated a pattern,
i fell asleep to the *hellraiser ii: hellbound
soundtrack
by christopher young...
       day-in-day out: as if to pressurise the idea that
the faculty of dreaming could be censored in the same way
that thinking is censored in liberal speech
eroding people's vocabulary, **** included.
     what i mean by that: every day i woke up with 15 minutes
of despair, then the zenith came after i lay in bed
for 4 hours and felt too many leeches ******* at me...
   those 15 minutes of despair were always there,
but then i usually got up and went about my daily business...
i admit that whiskey could be to blame,
anyone could argue the alcohol-is-bad argument,
but arguing as R. D. Laing might have that it's
also a sedative if you don't include social adhesion to loosen
the tension of going out and dancing:
then i don't see the point of saying it's all bad.
         sleeping pills (i found) are not 100% active without
what the prescription states that you should do:
i exceed limits, but then i write during the night -
            create a balance and i'm sure any insomnia
might be made minimal... anyway:
so i've been doing this roundabout experiment,
listening to the above album while falling asleep,
but then yesterday i decided to fall asleep listening to
godspeed you! black emperor's album F♯ A♯ ∞,
and guess what the experiment proved:
  i felt little or no anguish for 15 minutes,
obviously the usual groggy of a pseudo-hangover,
  but that doesn't mean staying in bed for 4 hours
because you feel **** about life 'n' all...
                   as already stated there's what we call
a cartesian dichotomy, that somehow altered mental
states cannot be translated into a physicality -
depression in this sort of language becomes lethargy -
people never seemed to connect the dots that
state the monism of everything having a pairing either
side of Humpty-Dumpty sitting on the ergo fence
asking about a flying omelette... ergo is a variation
of what precipitates... depression = lethargy...
the purest kind of what i know (i have enough psychiatric
literature to redeem myself from what would
be deemed quack-medicine with their quack doctors) -
some say that taking the vitamin B12 supplement
could help you: or that weak digestion is to blame, too.
i would be quack doctor if i was in a position of power,
and since i am not really earning anything from my
"poems", what sort of power can i abuse? trust -
but then again these are thought experiments,
           i first experiment on myself, then note down
the observations i have accounted for.
               so what will my unconscious eat today while
i switch off my consciousness? i was thinking of
the cure's disintegration album,
         perhaps that's why i did weeks of falling asleep
to a horror movie soundtrack, to later move into
neo-prog "rock" and then into 80s goth melancholia...
    i'd say that pop ****** melancholics off...
and such a nicer word for depression...
                   it's not even close to compression and has
nothing to do with aviation or the Netherlands...
     melan, melan: ah! melanism - a certain darkness,
    choly -         condition of darkness...
       and that star of Bethlehem appeared at night...
man of sorrows, well that's just blatant;
           but for all the romanticisation about darkness
and the mysterious moon and all the insomnia,
i still prefer the anti-cartesian explanation of actually
creating the proper answer to what has become
a dichotomy between the physical sciences and
the pseudo sciences, given that ergo is a precipitation
then for the two opposite to become inseparable
depression must be equal to lethargy: which is a variation
of the grander genus (family): metabolism.
               is this the point where i re-quote that famous:
doctor! heal yourself!
                                      well, if there's anything to go by
i have in my mind, given my life a prolonging in a way,
what was it... amitriptyline?
                                         the new ******* for
the respectably prone to citizenship's serenity of leaving
other people to their own demises -
  i mean, look at all the teetotalers: hyperactive bunnies
with too much energy that translated into things like
the infamous pyramids and the doubly infamous chimneys.

ii. the danish girl

i would have never thought that the transgender movement
had such a puritanism about it,
such platonism - nearing martyrdom;
who could have thought?! i only managed to see the film
today... i'm a sentimental ******* and i was choking
on not crying at the end of the film
here was a true representation of an artist,
         there's he (einar wegenar): a successful local
artist, within the confines of Copenhagen,
modestly famous: primarily because of having
perfected a technique and sourced it in a childhood
memory that keeps haunting him,
    thus he keeps repeating it, although with slight
alternation to refresh it, but no photograph to work
from, hence my previous statement:
  memory is the best cinema or arts' gallery (this
is not a universal statement, memory doesn't always
heal, or fascinate or have the ability to revitalises itself
or become the most potent "hallucinogenic" experience);
and then she's there (gerda wegener), also
painting, but more in line with paying the rent
rather than appeal, rich people needing portraits to
hang on the walls of the future of their lineage
        in years to come so someone might boast:
that was my ancestor, who founded the first bank
of Copenhagen sort of stories -
and all she wants to do is be an artist like Einar;
and she keeps coming back from galleries with her
works and they never give the critics any appeal
at being original - they have a suggestive generic
quality to them: precisely because they've been painted
for money. art is cruel in that way,
  when critics reduce producing art like they might reduce
being a cashier in a supermarket on the basis of:
job done... then comes the offense from the artist.
the beauty of this film is the platonism that soon explodes,
the near innocence... i really don't know how
the transgender movement borrowed from this:
all those Baphomet ******* with too many parts,
silicon chests and ***** and what not?
       this is one of the finest forms of defamation -
these days the transgender movement is so sexually
potent it doesn't really deserve what can only appear
as a self-imposed crucifixion...
              this story predates the unearthing of the nag
hammadi scripts, it's intuitively bound to what was
unearthed in 1945...
      einar sees the desperation of gerda, he knows
that he'll simply remain a local artist,
    bound to a square mile of earth, local, provincial
even... what he decides on is best expressed
by Marilyn Manson's lyrics: now i'm not an artist
i'm a ******* work of art
.
        how can not this resonate further into the film
if not by this motto:
it is a consecration of a memory, to invert it and
un-seize the moment long ago experienced and now
fuelling art, or the repetition of a safe technique established.
one man's frustration and a woman in a cage:
the potential seen - then a sudden bursting of madness,
the evident anti-cross -
                                  to say he had reached his limits
and she was kept frustrated and under-appreciated is
blatant enough, this self-sacrifice for a woman to
find her subject, was all too evident when she utters
the words that: the student overcomes the teacher,
and that's the whole story,
                       he has to walk into the canvas,
     in whatever way imaginable, and what a better way
than on a whim to escape the dreariness of parties
   by dressing up as a woman, after gerda's model
is late so she can continue a painting and einar
has to step in and wear a few female garments...
       to later realise the Dionysian consequence:
                                  only to the utmost excess, from here.
this could hardly be a propaganda movie for
the transgender movement... the "propaganda"
aspect ends when you hear children imitating this
artistic "prank" in today's society...
      it wasn't a prank in the slightest: but a profound
expression of love between two artists...
          outside of art the whole transgender movement
is still only ***** and silicon **** of Thailand's lady-boys:
that's not reality?        
although i actually did choke with nearing to cry
in the closing scene...
    unlike the Christ story... there was no resurrection.
so hans and gerda travel to the place where
einar depicted the landscape in his revisions,
       and both of them are standing there
        and it's ****** pulverising with so much depth
upon being so little when reduced to a canvas
but because you see the painting first, do you later
see the landscape with more emotion...
     and i thought to myself: gerda will recreate
the landscape in her own eyes, she'll what he saw
and what he gave up for her to paint him in his
transformative (transfigurative) state of becoming
lili elbe...
                     that's why i was about to cry -
     that she could put lili aside, and return to /
resurrect the memory of einar the locally famous
artist... that she would apply the same technique in
painting lili / einar but turn her attention to
landscapes... as if to imply that both of them became
reunited before all the madness of life came chasing them
into extremes.
          to my dissatisfaction? after the film ended
and before the credits started rolling... postscriptum facts
after these true events... she continued to paint
lili / einar as she did, which prompted her to fame
on the Parisian estrade; after seeing that, written down?
tears? what tears... i'm actually thankful that i choked
on them and didn't do an outburst necessarily...
thank **** i wasn't watching the film alone!
     i know that i might have invoked a sense of:
rough around the edges with this description, but i'm hoping
it's abstract enough to make the film more potent:
filling the blanks with images;
still, this was used for a transgender movement?
                                                did he make it plainly obvious
that this was a transcendental transgender iconoclasm?
         it's the platonic element in it that steers this whole
story, away from what 21st century movements regard
as prototype for their ******.
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2016
i'm not writing, more or less simply knitting, a jumper -
which is more than just a mere poem.
the comfort allowance, listening to delta goodrem
      and i love pop,
                      more than a rugby
player aged ~20,
                       mind you,
sometimes labouring over one
selfie with 20 Chinese to match
makes you feel oh so good -
                   it took those 20 Chinese
the same effort - pretty white girl
and blonde syndrome,
                        eastern Europe gets a sniff
and simply says: well, that' ****, isn't it?
                      the days that came with
the motto: we need astronauts more than
tourists...
                     days like these i rather take selfies
of the sleeper than write something...
                and i do...
i fiddle on the roof
                                          and cartoon the rest...
                   because that matters.
                            pristine Australian and the gimmicks
worthy of South Korean singalongs....
                                          next in line
***** duped Jews...
                                     whenever the gentleman
lost hist top-hat and the confectioner glyph typo -
                       me and an audience?
as in a day job?
                                  i don't mind...
                        d'ah la la la...
                                              and the piano....
                these days are rare....
                                                having enough words
in-tune with all others...
                                                     of such days
i say: sometimes a picture revitalises the lost words....
               and when encouraged
                                         a slip-up of beckoning...
readied for an avalanche -
                                   to make writing into
knitting a jumper or a scarf...
                                           equivalent...
in a society that deems Japanese culture
                  inquiries
                                     as the righteous standards
to avoid the jobs of nursing and dentistry -
                        well...
                               ­         we're in sure need of robotics
to ease off stress that our societies have
themselves halving demand...
                   sure, she's still there,
crazy naked and starving a kaleidoscope hope
                    of reminiscence
                             concerning a fear of spiders:
that do not weave webbing...
                                        the size of your palm...
        those ones, scary...
                                          that context of x,
between agoraphobia minor
                                                (in an urban setting)            
                            and agoraphobia major
in an countryside setting -
                           phobia: or the intricate fear
when an antidote is due because of too much rationalism -
                           agoraphobia minor:
              fear of being in an open space with too many people...
agoraphobia major:
                               fear of being in an open space
anticipating a congregation that never comes...
                       i'm enthralled by these compounds:
kindred of: lithium salts - or other compounds.
                     sometimes just a day with a selfie...
or a poem like this: an exercise in utilising language
                                  to no grand scheme of making a profit:
rather an indentation, and nothing more.
Poetic T Feb 2017
They always were as they are now, weaving there
toes between the earth. Do you know how many footsteps
can move the earth beneath the impressions of the
gravity of there every single motion.

                                                               "No neither me,

But their inclination of premature motivation is the
driving force between every footstep that greets with
forward motions. The phosphorescent blossom that
is held within each others possession that neither will relinquish.
                                                     ­                 
                                               ­  "Does breath extinguish hope,

No it revitalises that which was given luminosity through
words of encouragement, for when the foreboding Cimmerian
clings to the edges of what was vivid but now dulled by the
effects of a stain that inclines upon the naivety of creations breath.

                                                      "­How many flickers make a light,

That was the inevitable questioning of everything that followed,
every breath that was extinguished suffocated from existences
unobscured exhalation. But breath cant be asphyxiated if each
hold an respiration of a lingering flicker. Each did breath for the other.

"Though a radiance  is extinguished,
                        *"There is always another burning bright,
annh May 2019
Hope to be...a hopeless romantic...hoping for the best...when all hope is lost.

Hope, I’ve always maintained, is like waiting with enthusiasm for something that is never going to happen. Such dedication!

And then I second-guessed myself.

Does it matter if what is hoped for eventuates or remains perpetually elusive? Is the practice of hope an event in itself; the lift in the shoulders, the spring in the step, the intangible high which gets us through? Maybe, that’s what hope is, no more or less than that. A survival mechanism of the highest order. An antidote to despair and disappointment which resuscitates the spirit, revitalises our connection to the world we live in, and inspires our momentum forward.

Hope is a self-generated experience which, with a select few thoughts or words, we can create for our own or for another’s benefit at any time and under any circumstances, irrespective of what is gained or lost in actuality. Granted, our individual perspective and personal biography directs our ability to conjure this sweet synaptic syntax, but with practice it can be ours for the taking.

Hope allies itself with truth and makes a friend of acceptance. It recognises what is possible and what is not. Hope has no expiry date but what we hope for does, and as such, hopes can be re-expressed, discarded, or adjusted in concert with our emotional evolution. Only with the advantage of hindsight can we declare a hope false or lost, and so often this declaration is made by an observer rather than the affected party.

Hope will always precede the outcome to which it is applied, a little like predicting the future, and therein lies the rub. As far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as false hope, only that which is falsely applied. It is up to us to discern the difference.

'When you have lost hope, you have lost everything. And when you think all is lost, when all is dire and bleak, there is always hope.'
- Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four

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