The City of the Immortals

The City of the Immortals

Stairways in and out of my mind

An apple of the blind eye

Four faces all avert their gaze

Guess it all figures in figures -

I was never meant to understand,

The cave dwellers spoke of

Where the heart runs away from the hand

Do the walls hide them or  protect us?

Mirrors that we reflect

Monstrously yoked together!

It all figures in figures

Purposeless ways purposefully wrought

The cave dwellers spoke of

An eternity they forgot

They live for forever

In what eternity would consider a day

And this, this they called reason

"This city, I thought, is so horrific that its mere existence - the mere fact of it having endured, even in the middle of a secret desert - pollutes the past, and the future, and somehow compromises the stars! So long as this city endures no one in the world can ever be happy, or courageous. I do not want to describe it."

- Jorge Luis Borges, The Immortals (The Aleph and Other Short Stories)

Wargames

My teeth are bullets

Digging through my gums

My friends are memories

Left somewhere in the mud

My eyes are reticles

My solid gunpowder skin

Im a profitable abomination

One day you'll grapple with me, your sin

My fingers are bayonets

They do not caress

Come get rid of me -

Add another bullet to my chest

In me you see glory

In me you see horror

In me you see money

In me you see a rise

(...a fall)

So come throw your life away, child

Gamble on margins razor thin

You struggle and fight against your demons

But rest assured we will win

One Must Imagine Zeus Laughing

I hear it now ringing

Through this town where was once my life

I hear the arrows whistling and singing

Abject truths in this temporary lie

I hear it now ringing

In our failures and in our demise

Words with their wings torn apart

Never to reach the storied wise

Oh I hear it ringing,

From Macedon down to Crete

A most resplendent decoration

Over the battlefield of our defeat

Oh I hear it ringing

from the hills does it bellow fair

I hear our gods laughing

And see Aphrodite wash blood from her hair

(The title is a play on the famous Albert Camus quote “One must imagine Sissyphus happy”)

GAVDIA MINOTAVRI - The Joys of the Minotaur

Man, ever a chimerical creature, is trapped in the most illustrious prison to have ever been fashioned. But the only question worth asking is whether the creature is more Daedalus or the minotaur? Our species has debased the act of entrapment in and of itself into a kindness. Billions of would be Daedaluses have built many millions of facsimiles of Knossos to trap minotaurs into worlds they may comprehend. Into struggles they may endure. For in a world built on understanding, the unknown is uncomfortable and the unfathomable is violently divine.

The minotaur is ever the imposing beast when trapped within the labyrinth. When the world outside seems so very distant and its whims are catered to as long as it cannot leave. Mankind is much the same. The minotaur had no conception of Theseus until he materialized, and unable to glimpse the world beyond the walls of Knossos, he never sat to question his unnatural place in this world.  He was content. But we, who have by the powers of our ingenuity glimpsed beyond those walls, now envy the minotaur. Mankind sees the larger freedom and reenacts the smaller instead. It seeks chains and collars such as "purpose" and "meaning" to pretend the freedom is smaller than it truly is.

And one might ask - what of that minotaur who, whether by guile or by luck, finally glimpsed the splendors of the stars and the sun?

(Explanations:

Being bedridden for a week, I had nothing but time to think. I wrote The Joys of the Minotaur for two reasons. The first was practical. You know those Metal songs that use like a small speech before the actual song? These are usually from books or television etc but I've always wanted to write one of those.

As I was doodling on that, I found myself thinking about what to say. I thought about the philosophical texts that I find most inspirational. In this case Plato's Allegory of the Cave came to mind. I am a big believer in that, that mankind not only fears what it doesn't understand but that it will happily jump into chains to feel in control. That it will pretend to be more impotent than it is because the freedom of choice is unnerving to the human condition. That the fear of failure is less scary than the fear of blame.

This observation is, of course, nothing new. It's a mix of the existentialist concepts of bad faith and authenticity (which you can find in Kierkegaard, Sartre and Heidigger et al) with the Allegory of the Cave. It has more nuance than I relay here but even I know this is getting long. But the second reason was that I enjoyed how the imagery came together.

I chose the minotaur because of its very specific type of captivity, as well as how Minos fed Asterion (which, fun fact, is the name of the specific Cretan minotaur) until Theseus killed him. In its little labyrinth at Knossos the minotaur was king. Or at least, so it believed.)