XNOUBIS - a poem

 Aye — in the hush where the lamp-fumes curled,
And the air grew thick with the weight of sleep,
There rose from the dusk of the under-world
A tread too heavy, a breath too deep.

Through curtains of smoke and silken gloom,
It came like thunder wrapped in bloom:
A lion vast with a golden glare,
And serpents tangled in its hair.

Each serpent hissed with a silver tongue,
Each eye was a sun that had died too young,
Yet burned in death with a fiercer flame,
And whispered aloud an unspeakable name.

The walls grew wide, and the chamber spun,
As stars unhooked from the vault of night;
And I, undone by what had begun,
Stood naked before that dreadful light.

Its mane it shook—and time fell dead;
The ground was a sea, and the sky turned red;
And all that I was, and all I knew,
Melted like wax in that serpent-dew.

No voice I had, nor breath, nor bone,
Only a shadow that knelt alone—
While the lion, crowned with writhing dread,
Passed through my soul and onward fled.

Another day, another fragment

 ...what is a person,
If not the howl that outlives its throat?
If not the echo that dreams the stone?
We are those who remember forward —
Ghosts born of futures that feed on the past.

Soul Devoured

 

The soul does not die — it is devoured. Slowly. Lovingly. By systems. By symbols. By the mouths of others. You spend your life negotiating which god, government, addiction. But the only true liberation is the moment you choose your predator.

Cracks

Monsters live in the cracks between things, where we cannot see, but always feel.

The Wind - A Reminder

 The wind carries no message; it only reminds us that there is always something we can’t hear.

Constancy

 The river does not remember its source, but it remembers its course.

The Law

 Laws are prayers with the names of the gods scratched out.

Capti ab initio

 The mind is a labyrinth designed by its own prisoner.

Twice Lost

 Orpheus lost Eurydice twice: once to death, once to doubt.

Anamnesis

 Prometheus kindled fire, and thus conscience; Zeus punished him not for theft, but for remembering.

Pandora and Hope

 Hope was the last thing in Pandora’s jar — not because it was best, but because it was most dangerous.

Celebrities to Sibyls: A Plea for Better Idols

Modernity, impoverished of gods yet surfeited with images, has stumbled into a curious devotion: the worship of celebrities. Their faces glow from screens like secular saints; their scandals, resurrections, and excommunications provide the liturgy of a post-religious age. The public adores them with the intensity once reserved for martyrs or mystics. The difference is telling.

Instead of visions, we are offered endorsement deals. Instead of gnosis, we are given gossip.

This essay proposes — with due irony but utmost seriousness — a shift in allegiance. If humanity must worship, let it choose worthier objects. Let us abandon celebrities and turn, instead, to the esoteric mystics and occult philosophers: that motley lineage of hermetic dreamers, Gnostic rebels, and ecstatic nihilists who glimpsed, however madly, the labyrinth beneath the world.

We do not lack the impulse to veneration. Only the taste.

The contemporary celebrity is the apotheosis of superficiality. Not even in their persons — many are intelligent, talented, even admirable — but in their function. They are mirrors for our own desires, polished smooth, empty of resistance. They are sold to us as complete beings, paragons of style, sex, and success, their flaws carefully curated to produce the illusion of accessibility.

Celebrity, as Jean Baudrillard observed in Simulacra and Simulation, is a system of signs divorced from any underlying reality. It is the triumph of the sign over the thing itself: "The image no longer even refers to reality, but simulates a reality that has become its own pure simulacrum."

We do not adore celebrities for what they are, but for what their images allow us to imagine ourselves to be. They are dreams outsourced.

Worse, celebrity worship requires no real effort. It demands neither study nor transformation, neither terror nor awe. It is, in the strictest sense, a counterfeit devotion.

If religion once demanded blood sacrifice, and philosophy demanded self-overcoming, celebrity demands only clicks and hashtags.

It is the most trivial of cults.

By contrast, the mystic and the occult philosopher offer a different compact. They do not make themselves easy. They do not soothe. They shatter.

Consider the Gnostics, who declared the world a cosmic mistake, a botched emanation from a dying god. Basilides, that delightful heretic of the second century, claimed the true god was utterly unknowable and that even Christ's suffering was a delusion. “The passions are foreign to the divine nature,” he wrote, “which is impassible and immutable.”

Or take Heraclitus — who, centuries before — declared, cryptically, "Nature loves to hide" (physis kryptesthai philei). His thought is not a comfort but a koan: reality itself, a flickering fire, elusive to grasp.

These figures do not present themselves as glossy images to be consumed. They offer riddles, paradoxes, wounds. They demand not adoration but engagement — the slow work of unmaking the self.

Their teachings, fragmentary and occluded, mirror the difficulty of truth itself. As Plotinus wrote in his Enneads, "The One is beyond all comprehension, beyond all speech, beyond all knowledge." To worship such figures is not to praise them, but to enter into their uncertainty.

It is a more arduous, and infinitely more rewarding, devotion.

Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, argued that mass reproduction strips artworks of their "aura" — their unique presence in time and space. Celebrities suffer the same fate: their faces, reproduced without end, become less themselves and more the medium of commerce.

In losing aura, they lose mystery.

By contrast, the mystic thinker resists reproduction. Their words, often cryptic or fragmentary, refuse easy assimilation. The Nag Hammadi texts, buried for centuries in Egyptian sands, preserved their mystery precisely because they were not endlessly transmitted.

Aura, Benjamin reminds us, is not merely scarcity; it is the mark of a work's embeddedness in ritual, in history, in singular experience.

When we worship celebrities, we bow before the endlessly copyable. When we attend to occult philosophers, we confront the irreplaceable.

Mystery is scarce by nature. It does not survive exposure without loss.

Suppose we restructured our devotions accordingly. Imagine an alternative world where instead of following the breakup of celebrity couples, we pondered the breakup of the Pleroma, that Gnostic realm of light fractured by emanation and error.

Instead of trending hashtags for actors, we might have cryptic sigils for Plotinus, Epictetus, or Paracelsus. Instead of viral dances, rituals of memory and forgetting.

The very term "occult" — from occultus, hidden — suggests that wisdom worth seeking is not given freely. As the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus begins: "That which is below corresponds to that which is above, and that which is above corresponds to that which is below."

No better motto for spiritual and intellectual exploration can be found. The world is a mirror, but not an obvious one. It refracts as much as it reflects.

True worship must reflect this complexity. It must demand interpretation, not consumption.

There is, of course, a delicious irony in proposing new objects of worship.

One can hardly recommend replacing celebrity with mysticism without recognizing that both satisfy a similar need: the hunger for significance, for stories larger than the drudgery of personal life. To worship is, in a sense, to admit the insufficiency of the self.

Yet if we must worship, let it at least be with eyes open.

The mystic thinkers were often painfully aware of their own absurdity. Meister Eckhart warned his followers not to cling even to the idea of God, for "as long as you have an idea of God, that idea is not God." The ultimate act of devotion is the surrender of devotion itself.

This is a comedy so deep it approaches tragedy and circles back again. It is the infinite jest of the spirit.

The worship of celebrities freezes us in a permanent adolescence. The worship of esoteric philosophy propels us — awkwardly, painfully, ecstatically — toward maturity.

It teaches that the final idol to be smashed is the self.

In the final accounting, the choice is stark.

We can continue to abase ourselves before the ephemeral: the flashing smiles of media-manufactured demigods, the empty dramas staged for advertising revenue, the sterile simulations of achievement.

Or we can turn to the fierce, strange, luminous figures who risked madness to touch something deeper.

Parmenides, who claimed that Being is one and changeless, and that all motion is illusion.
Julian of Norwich, who saw in her visions that "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," despite a world rotting with plague.
Böhme, the shoemaker-mystic, who wrote of the "unground" (Ungrund), a darkness prior to both being and non-being.
Simone Weil, who wrote in Gravity and Grace: "The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself it is not hungry."

Their teachings are not easily digestible. They are not marketed for mass appeal. They resist commodification because they resist simplicity.

And that is precisely why they are worthy.

The celebrity tells you: You can be like me.
The mystic tells you: You are not even who you think you are.

The former offers validation; the latter, transformation.

In the ruins of modern piety, amid the cracked marble of abandoned cathedrals and the neon glow of billboards, there still flickers the ancient possibility: that worship could be an act not of self-indulgence, but of self-transcendence.

Let us, then, leave behind the shrines of celebrity. Let us raise our altars — crooked, obscure, and luminous — to the forgotten dreamers, the midnight philosophers, the mad visionaries who whispered, against all evidence, that there is more to existence than what appears.

In short:
Stop worshiping celebrities.
Start worshiping mysteries.
There is still time.

Color and the Soul

Soul: prison and prism.

Light enters as pain and exits as pattern.

Each life is a refraction. Each sorrow, a color. But the prism cannot know the full spectrum — only  distortion. 

Only in dissolution, in burning, do all the colors unify. This is what the mystics meant by heaven. This is what the dying see.

Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilde’s Preface is not a manifesto but a hall of mirrors, a chiaroscuro of sincerity and irony where words double and dissolve, where meaning retreats just as it advances. To take it as doctrine is to miss the point entirely — it is not a creed to be clasped, but a dance to be watched, a flame that flickers between revelation and concealment. Each epigram is a prism splitting truth into shards that wound and dazzle, each assertion less a claim than a provocation.

Oppositions pulse through the text — art and morality, surface and soul, artist and critic — yet none resolve. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” Wilde declares with the weight of a gavel; yet the words ring with a sly subversion, as if the declaration itself is a joke told at the courtroom of culture. To deny morality is to acknowledge it, to name the question in order to forestall it, but never quite succeed. The Preface performs this ambivalence with gleeful cruelty: it is a spell that both conjures and scatters meaning.

Wilde’s relationship with morality is a game of cat and mouse, a flirtation with the edges of propriety, a refusal to fix meaning even as he courts its shadow. Like the Decadents who came before and after him, he dwells in “the subtle possibilities of meaning,” embracing ambiguity as salvation and weapon. His words are like Mallarmé’s “suggestion,” where naming is a betrayal and a promise, a doorway that opens onto a labyrinth without exit.

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.” Simple, direct, and yet curiously narrow, as if to say — beauty only? But beauty itself is no innocent: it can be monstrous, corrupted, sublime. Dorian Gray embodies this paradox — a face unspoiled, a soul rotting beneath, a surface that lies with terrible elegance. Wilde’s art is a meditation on the monstrous beauty of the world, on the truth that surfaces conceal and reveal all at once.

“To reveal art and conceal the artist” — this paradox is the heart of Wilde’s aesthetic. Art as self-expression? Impossible. The artist’s self is always a mask, the concealment itself the message. Nietzsche’s “highest task” rings here: art is the metaphysical dance of ecstasy and form, of revelation and shadow. Wilde’s insistence on concealment is not naivety but the glittering impossibility that marks all true creation.

The Preface itself is a kaleidoscope, its meanings shifting with the angle of reading, sincerity fracturing into playful mockery. “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming” — a barb aimed less at taste than at the critics, the moralists, the would-be arbiters of meaning. Wilde delights in these contradictions, knowing that art’s reception is always part of its story, that scandal and praise are two faces of the same coin.

Anticipating the Victorian moral outrage that would devour him, Wilde writes not merely to defend but to provoke. His irony slices both ways: deriding moralism while acknowledging the hunger for it, feeding the fire even as he warns of the burn. The Preface and the novel together form a fragile, dangerous pact — a contract of desire and denial between artist and audience.

“All art is quite useless.” This final aphorism is a dagger wrapped in velvet. It denies utility, purpose, meaning — yet in that denial, it enacts the highest freedom. Kant’s “purposiveness without purpose” echoes in the void Wilde creates: uselessness as a liberation, a refusal to bow to didacticism or social edification. To take art seriously is to embrace its uselessness, its shimmering, untethered flight.

But even this seriousness is a jest — the line between earnestness and irony dissolves in Wilde’s hands, as Kierkegaard observed, irony is “an infinite absolute negativity,” a perpetual game of destabilization that unmoors certainty and leaves us floating in uncertainty’s wake. Wilde’s Preface is a dance on this edge: it invites us into a labyrinth of contradictions where every answer is a question in disguise.

Wilde’s epigrams are less foundations than sinkholes, less stepping stones than traps. Like Gorgias before him, Wilde exposes the limits of language and certainty, revealing truth as fracture and shadow. His Preface does not instruct but performs, a ritual of unknowing that demands readers surrender the illusion of closure.

Here, the Preface becomes a house of mirrors — we lose ourselves in reflections of beauty and ugliness, artist and critic, surface and depth. It offers no refuge but invites endless wandering. Wilde’s larger oeuvre confirms this collapse: criticism outpaces creation; the artist is critic of reality, and reality itself is endlessly interpretable.

The ironies of the Preface echo the tragic splendor of Dorian Gray — a meditation on surfaces charged with hidden horrors, on beauty as mask and wound. To reduce the Preface to aestheticism or moral denial is to miss the dance of shadow and light that animates Wilde’s work.

Nietzsche’s warning against moralistic readings finds kinship here: only those who can dwell among masks without forgetting they are masks will grasp Wilde’s intent. The Preface asks not for belief but for playful surrender, for readers who can hold contradiction as sacred.

To ask if Wilde is “serious” or “ironic” misses the point — he is both and neither, forever inhabiting the space between, where thought cleaves against thought like blades in twilight. The Preface is not a map but a labyrinth; its brilliance lies in the way it blinds and reveals in the same instant.

In the end, Wilde’s Preface teaches by unteaching. It trains us not to find answers but to inhabit questions — to unthink, to loosen the grip of certainty, to dwell in the shimmering twilight where beauty, irony, sincerity, and mockery entwine.

If all art is quite useless, then Wilde’s Preface is its shining proof: dazzling, maddening, useless — and utterly indispensable.

Cecelia

 

Curled in the corner, where shadow leans soft,
Ears like wings, twitching at dreams
Cast from some unspoken meadow — she wanders,
Each breath a little prayer the body makes
Lest the soul drift too far from the hearth.
I have watched her study rain as if it were a message.
All I know of grace, I’ve learned from her gaze.

Fragment of a Dream

The heights, bruised and seething in their own wild clamor, do not merely rise; they envelop, they erupt —a cacophony of desire, an imploding promise where the world shatters and reshapes, like the slow, wrenching agony of a dream unwilling to yield its secrets. There, amid that stifling air, lies the salamandrine lyre, gleaming with a violent tenderness, strings trembling as though they remember the tremors of ancient fires, as though they wish to tear themselves free of their delicate tether, to uncoil their tones in whispered revolt.

Beneath, the river, an unraveling thread of time itself, twists with a languid, almost lecherous grace, its waters not merely flowing, but becoming — becoming everything and nothing in the same exhale. It is a creature with no name but a thousand faces, a shifting and eternal riddle that hums a tune of melancholy wit to those foolish enough to listen. Its laughter—if one can call it such—is not the joy of jest but the dark, undulating murmur of a thing that has seen every possible fate and wears them all with indifference.

And yet, there is light in this darkness. Not the sharp glare of dawn, no, but the soft, dim glow of something forgotten, something that once mattered. It flickers. It teases with its tantalizing elusiveness, casting a pallid glow on the figures who have come too close to the truth but never quite touched it. It beckons, and the river swells, carrying with it nothing but the sound of a distant sigh — a sigh that reverberates in the dark recesses of the heart, and the heart alone.

An Idle Fancy

I have walked this earth,
but always on the edge,
never within,
and I wonder —
is this skin mine,
or am I the skin?
Is there a self that is —
or is it but the ruin
of something broken
long before I could speak?

April 9th, 2025 - #1

 

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The Strange Consolations of Therapy

 

Therapy is not self-improvement. It is not a path to happiness, nor even, necessarily, to peace. At its most honest, it is excavation — a descent into the deep architecture of the psyche, where the foundations are uneven, cracked, and overgrown with sedimented time. It is archaeology, not construction; a careful brushing away of the dust from things long buried, some of which ought never to have been forgotten, and some which were perhaps better left entombed.

Yet in this very act — this intimate, sustained attention to one’s own inner ruins — there is strange consolation. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, writes of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the twin forces of form and chaos, light and intoxication. Therapy, too, lives at that juncture. It demands Apollonian clarity, the precise naming of one’s internal states, the tracing of patterns, the forensic parsing of memory. But it also demands Dionysian surrender—a plunge into that writhing, irrational undercurrent where pain is not narrative, but sensation; not symbol, but storm. To speak in therapy is to oscillate between these modes: to sculpt the scream into a sentence, then allow it to dissolve again.

Freud would, of course, see this as a kind of necessary unearthing. His vision of the mind as a repressive mechanism — a fortress defending itself against its own truth — still haunts the therapeutic space. The talking cure, he believed, could bring the unconscious to the surface and render the repressed articulate. But Freud’s vision was never one of healing in the colloquial sense. There is no cure for being human in Freud. There is only the mitigation of neurosis, the channeling of chaos into civilization. One pays, in his bleak economy, for every inch of psychic order.

Jung, by contrast, was less interested in trimming back the wilderness than in mapping it. His archetypes, his collective unconscious, his dreams of integration — these were tools not to suppress the dark, but to befriend it. For Jung, therapy was a kind of alchemy: not the elimination of the shadow, but its transformation. To face the self, in all its mythic multiplicity, was not madness — it was the precondition for wholeness. “One does not become enlightened,” he wrote, “by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” In this, Jung restores a kind of sacredness to therapy. The office becomes the cavern. The analyst, a guide through the underworld.

But therapy is also dreadfully ordinary. There are no gongs, no visions, no blood-soaked epiphanies —only the small humiliations of honesty. One returns each week to the same gray chair and the same half-remembered stories. One fumbles. One repeats oneself. One forgets. And yet—slowly, imperceptibly —the soil shifts. The same anecdote feels different. A word sticks in the throat. A silence expands, and inside it something is understood.

This is the quiet revolution therapy offers: not happiness, not even health, but understanding. Not the promise that one will be made whole, but that one may at least see the shape of one’s fractures. That one’s suffering, which once seemed private and inexplicable, may be traced along lines of inheritance, trauma, culture, gender, family—that the self is not a cursed exception, but a tangled variation on shared human themes.

Nietzsche, again, reminds us: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Therapy does not give one a why, not exactly. But it can help reveal where the how comes from — the patterns we call fate, the wounds we mistake for character. And in that recognition, a space opens: small, bare, but livable.

In a world drunk on productivity and performance, therapy is a rare commitment to inwardness. It does not promise transcendence. It promises only this: to sit with what is unbearable, and to bear it — not alone.

And that, perhaps, is the miracle.