The Spectroscopic Soul

The stars ask no questions.
They simply burn.
But I, being human, must turn even the burning into parable.
My soul is a poor spectroscope,
but still I aim it skyward.

Frozen in the Dark

The pale visitor rose above my bed,
her frozen gaze a weight upon my chest,
high breasts like moonlit ruins overhead,
the shadowed grove between her white skin pressed,
each whispered sigh a promise I might fall,
her laughter threading silence through my head,
and drew my failing soul toward the pall.

I could not move, could not refuse her claim,
her hand a frost upon my weary heart,
each breath a tide that whispered only shame,
the world dissolved, its mercy torn apart,
I felt the dark invite me to the deep,
its cold enough to steal my final sleep,
and leave no echo of my broken start.

Going Insane by Revolutions

In sleep, my mind is a planet orbiting itself.
Dream is the dark matter that keeps me from flying apart.
It cannot be seen.
But without it, nothing would cohere.
Like Aquinas’ unmoved mover, it does not glow.
But it grips.

Coffins

All systems are coffins.

Language. Religion. Science. Even the self. Beautiful, decorated boxes made to preserve decay. If you linger long enough inside any belief, it embalms you. That is why mystics speak in riddles and poets lie: not to deceive, but to escape the gravity of closure.

What I Believe

Philosophy, as I inhabit it, proceeds from the tactile and ascends toward the cosmological without forfeiting the grain of the immediate: a hand rests upon rain-darkened granite and feels the lichened stipple beneath the fingertips; the nostrils register kelp-rot and diesel from the harbor; a gull’s cry fissures the morning air; from these particulars arises a meditation on sovereignty, appetite, and destiny, for every organism asserts a claim through metabolism and gesture, and every polity seeks to regulate that claim through ordinance and abstraction, smoothing the baroque singularity of persons into administrable silhouettes; I therefore champion the incandescent particular, the unrepeatable cadence of a voice in stairwell acoustics swollen with overpopulation, mattresses lining banisters, kettles hissing on portable burners while children chase rumor and pigeons through municipal dusk, because density generates both friction and fecundity, and friction sparks invention as readily as conflagration; I study addiction as civic scripture written in veins and credit ledgers, powders dissolving on tongues while algorithms circulate invitations, poison braided with remedy in the same ampoule, and I read in this choreography an economic catechism that reveals how desire migrates from bloodstream to marketplace and back again, a metonymic circuit whose voltages illuminate broader manias; I observe sexuality as theater of power and vulnerability, lamplight gilding clavicles, breath quickening into arrhythmic chant, bodies negotiating dominance and reciprocity with ethical consequence inscribed in muscle memory, and I insist upon lucidity in depicting these rites, for candor confers dignity even upon extremity; I attend to horror as an instrument of perception, torture chambers rendered with archival precision, witnesses trembling yet attentive, the grotesque elongation of limb or bloom of wound exposing appetites that polite discourse conceals, so that revulsion becomes pedagogue and the reader’s pulse tutors the intellect; I regard language as a feral garden where Latin roots tangle with dockside slang, anagrams wink from alley walls, coinages sprout like volunteer fennel, and through this lexical exuberance individuality resists homogenizing decree; I distrust regimes that standardize timbre and tempo, fluorescent corridors humming with committees that distribute beige vocabularies, while clandestine gardens of speech flourish in kitchens and printshops, irrigated by risk and laughter; I honor science as disciplined wonder, microscopes revealing ciliary forests in tidal pools, equations arching with austere elegance, laboratories luminous with antiseptic resolve, for inquiry binds humility to audacity and situates humanity within a wider animal syntax whose wolves and bees enact their own grammars of coordination; I contemplate determinism as climate, heredity, hunger, and fatigue pressing upon the body, yet within that pressure I witness craft as counterforce, cedar planed into fragrant scrolls, theorems coaxed into coherence, canvases saturated with vermilion and bruise-blue, each act of making a declaration of local sovereignty amid cosmic amplitude; I trace history’s upheavals through boulevards thronged with banners, presses thundering, sirens keening, hunger etching cheekbones into iconography, and I perceive beneath these spectacles a mythic undertow in which catastrophe and renewal entwine, apocalyptic dread paired with germinal possibility; I examine identity as sediment laid down by the verdicts of neighbors and newspapers, tribunals and lovers, until volcanic counterdefinition erupts and the self composes its own fugue against the chorus; I acknowledge Weltschmerz as afternoon dust in slant light, acedia as gray sediment in monastery and office alike, yet I cultivate an optimism grounded in sensuous contact, in moss carpeting granite, ravens wheeling above carrion, tides advancing with lunar fidelity, because the universe radiates plenitude through indifferent abundance and thereby invites fierce participation; I interrogate zero-sum domination against positive-sum cooperation in classrooms and bedrooms, markets and laboratories, observing that generosity multiplies vitality while coercion corrodes it, and I argue for a civilization that prizes exuberant difference over administrative symmetry; I traverse descent as pedagogy, archives and alleyways, incense and vellum, sigils traced in sand beside statistical tables, emerging with a gnosis earned through contact rather than decree; I compose with rhythmic intention, phrases swelling and receding like surf, each word bearing weight, each image anchored in phenomenological clarity, so that scholarship and lyricism interpenetrate; and through this long vigilance I affirm a creed of radical particularity, wherein every consciousness articulates its theorem in breath and gesture, where dread sharpens rather than silences perception, where politics yields before the flamboyant fact of singular lives, and where the page becomes a tidepool in which terror, beauty, appetite, and compassion coexist in phosphorescent simultaneity, inviting the reader into electric, responsible, civilized fervor.

 

More succinct - you ask me my philosophy? 

 

Exuberant particularity. 

Each organism articulates its own theorem of existence; each consciousness composes a fugue of memory and aspiration. Through attentive perception and fearless expression, life attains a radiance that outshines dread, even while acknowledging its shadowed twin.

Jupiter in Gemini

Under the heliacal glare of Jupiter transiting Gemini, the air acquires a ferric savor, as though the atmosphere itself had bitten its tongue. The twins preside over a bifurcated courtroom erected behind the forehead. Oak benches. Tarnished brass railings. A stenographer with your handwriting. The defendant and the magistrate share a pulse.

You rise to prosecute yourself.

Your charges proliferate with liturgical fastidiousness: indolence at 09:17; a half-sincere smile; the microsecond of envy when Sheri’s silence lengthened like a corridor without doors. Each infraction is catalogued in vermilion marginalia. The pen nib rasps across the page with an insectile insistence. Outside, Halifax steams under a pewter sky. The waterfront tilts inward, becomes an alveolus within your lung. 

You draft memoranda against your own fatigue. You convene subcommittees to evaluate your tremors. The minutes record a unanimous appetite for expiation. Somewhere in the rafters, a pair of translucent twins confer in a dialect of sparks. They exchange gavels. They exchange masks. Their laughter resembles typewriter keys striking bone.

Fanaticism flowers with sacerdotal hygiene. It bathes. It trims its nails. It recites aphorisms with the tonal gravity of scripture. Mercy appears in the docket as a clerical error. You excise it. You experience a tremulous lucidity, a clarity so acute it resembles frostbite. The red planet’s influence circulates through your capillaries, an iron catechism. Every thought bifurcates. Every motive acquires a doppelgänger who whispers that discipline requires spectacle.

Revenge germinates inwardly, a carnivorous orchid cultivated in the thoracic greenhouse. You fashion an adversary from mirrors and social rumor. Identity arrives by affidavit: the gaze of colleagues, the archived opinions of strangers, the spectral tribunal of imagined readers. They annotate your posture. They litigate your breathing. You internalize their jurisprudence until your silhouette feels externally authored. In the margins of your diary, you glimpse a footnote that claims to be you.

The narrative convulses. A dream intrudes: a municipal library where the shelves are vertebrae and each book murmurs your name in divergent accents. You wander the stacks, seeking an index to absolution. The catalogue yields only cross-references to further accusations. A custodian with twin faces offers you a mop saturated in carmine. You understand that the stain is antecedent to the spill.

Awakening performs no rescue. The room persists in a slightly oblique geometry. The desk elongates toward an eschaton of paper. You practice passive resistance against your own hunger for pardon. You fast from tenderness. You cultivate martyrdom as a horticultural art. The body becomes an archive of abstentions: clenched jaw, scapular ache, the sternum’s phosphorescent throb. Outside the window, a siren keens with operatic fervor; inside, a more intimate alarm rehearses apocalypse on a cellular scale.

Politics insinuates itself into the bloodstream. You perceive how identities are minted in the furnaces of opinion, how reputations circulate as currency, how the self becomes a referendum. Under the twin sign, discourse fractures into antiphony. You argue with yourself in impeccably footnoted paragraphs. You indict the culture that taught you this jurisprudence of self-laceration. You indict your complicity in its replication. Each sentence splits into a corridor with two exits, both leading deeper into the edifice.

Another interruption: hallucination. The harbour returns as a desert of oxidized waves. Ships stand upright like obelisks inscribed with your misdemeanors. The sky peels back, revealing a palimpsest of constellations that rearrange into a red ideogram. It resembles a mouth. It speaks your childhood nickname with sacerdotal tenderness. You feel a vertiginous tenderness toward your own fragility. The tribunal pauses. A tremor of amnesty flickers across the docket.

The twins confer again. One carries a blade honed on syllables. The other bears a needle threaded with dawn. They hover above your manuscript. They revise a single line: the sentence that declared you irredeemable. The ink shivers, rearranges its atoms. The geography remains unstable; the plot meanders through corridors without cartography. Yet within the ferric luminescence, amid the bureaucratic cruelty and apocalyptic murmuration, a clandestine tenderness persists, an insurgent footnote that refuses erasure.

Jupiter continues its transit. Gemini continues its bifurcation. You continue, paradox incarnate, both executioner and archivist, both captive and cartographer of the labyrinth. The courtroom dims. The harbour exhales. In the red afterglow, you inscribe a marginal gloss: Identity remains negotiated. The twins seal the page with a sigil of ash and ember.

52

Challenging myself to read one book a week. 

So far I have completed the following books:

• The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (2017), by Catherine Nixey. 

• I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2016), by Iain Reid. 

• The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome (2023), by Harry Sidebottom

• Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers (2001), by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

• Pox: Genius, Madness, And Mysteries Of Syphilis (2003), by Deb Hayden

• Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus (2012) by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

• The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy (2011), by Adrienne Mayor 

• The Inheritors (1955), by William Golding 

• The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick (2016), by Kyle Arnold

I also started but did not finish a few other books that I am either still in the process of reading or have shelved. 

Some splatterpunk novels I have completely abandoned (e.g., Gone to See the Riverman by Kristopher Triana, which felt... silly, controversial for the sake of controversy).

I am still in the process of reading:  

• How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (2010), by Adrian Goldsworthy

• Columbine (2009), by Dave Cullen  

• Boys in Zinc (1989), by Svetlana Alexievich 

• Magus: The Art of Magic in the Renaissance from Faustus to Agrippa (2023), by Anthony Grafton

• Horror in Architecture (2013) by Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing 

Feel free to post recommendations! I am always interested in interesting books on history, philosophy, psychology...