#O155-159: The Same Fatal Joy

In Cavafy’s poem “He Vows”, he writes:

Every so often he vows to start a better life.
But when night comes with her own counsels,
with her compromises, and with her promises;
but when night comes with her own power
of the body that wants and demands, he returns,
forlorn, to the same fatal joy.

It feels it is this way with my painting – I vow to push through and become proficient with abstracts, yet I always return to the same fatal joy of the wetland landscape of the inner mind.

Below are some abstracts I made – it remains an interesting, hard journey for me:

And one more landscape that did not make the front page:

Every morning I bite off a chunk of Fernando Pesoa’s Book of Disquiet. With the right mindset, one finds in it images that takes the mind to stillness and wonder:

I feel my head materially supported by the pillow in which it makes a valley. My skin and the skin of the pillowcase are like two people touching in the shadows. Even the ear on which I’m lying mathematically engraves itself on my brain. I blink with fatigue, and my eyelashes make an infinitesimal, inaudible sound against the felt whiteness of the pillow’s slope. I breathe, sighing, and my breathing happens – it isn’t mine. I suffer without feeling or thinking. The household clock, definitely located in the midst of the infinite, strikes the half hour, dry and void. Everything is so vast, so deep, so black and so cold! I pass times, I pass silences; formless worlds pass by me.

Meditation keeps pulling me into silence and boundaries not yet transcended. Slowly, as I return, time and time again, to the conditioned self which lies inside those unmarked boundaries, it becomes more known, tolerated, accepted.

Nisargadatta said:

Understand that the mind has limits. To go beyond, you must consent to silence. [I am That, (74)]

I hope you are well -thanks for visiting my blog!