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.

The Artful Irony of Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

Oscar Wilde's Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray has often been treated as a manifesto, a series of slogans wrapped in the glittering foil of epigram. Yet to take these aphorisms at face value would be to miss the point entirely. Wilde’s artistry lies not in offering doctrines to be swallowed whole, but in creating a space where sincerity and irony collapse into one another like facing mirrors. If Wilde appears to say everything and nothing, to declare a credo while slyly mocking the very possibility of having one, it is because the true genius of a good epigram is not its definitiveness, but its disorienting multiplicity.

The Preface is built of oppositions — art and morality, artist and critic, surface and soul — yet it refuses to resolve them. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” Wilde writes. “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” It is a daring pronouncement, glibly final, ringing with the authority of a closing gavel. But behind its apparent boldness looms a sly grin. That is all — but of course it isn’t. In the very act of disavowing morality, Wilde implicitly acknowledges the moral reception that literature inevitably provokes. His declaration tries to kill the question by naming it, like a magician revealing the secret of the trick while still performing it.

Wilde’s relationship to morality is thus one of ironic intimacy. He denies art's ethical stakes even as he courts them, a maneuver characteristic of the Decadent movement’s more agile thinkers. As Arthur Symons observed in his 1893 Symbolist Movement in Literature, the true Decadent "dreads nothing so much as the inevitable conclusion," preferring the "subtle possibilities of meaning." Wilde, with his gift for "subtle possibilities," loads his Preface with statements that oscillate between earnestness and parody. His aim is not to foreclose interpretation but to provoke it, an aesthetic ethos not unlike that of Stéphane Mallarmé, who, writing around the same time, insisted that "to name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment...to suggest, therein lies the dream."

Consider Wilde’s claim: “The artist is the creator of beautiful things.” On one hand, it reads as a plain assertion of aestheticism. On the other, it is curiously narrow. If beauty alone is the domain of the artist, what becomes of tragedy, the grotesque, the sublime? Wilde restricts art only to simultaneously imply that art cannot be restricted. Beauty, too, may be monstrous. Indeed, Dorian Gray is nothing if not a meditation on beauty corrupted, beauty turned against itself — the painted visage remaining pristine while the soul beneath curdles into horror.

Moreover, Wilde’s definition of the artist is absurdly utopian: “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.” Here again, the irony is thick. Art, as the very activity of human self-expression, cannot so easily efface the self. As Friedrich Nietzsche acidly noted in The Birth of Tragedy, all art is “the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life,” a dance of personal ecstasy masked in form. Wilde’s insistence on the artist’s concealment thus functions less as a practical prescription than as a glittering impossibility — a paradox whose impossibility is the point.

Indeed, Wilde’s Preface operates less like a philosophical treatise and more like a kaleidoscope: tilt it one way and it dazzles with sincerity; tilt it another and it shatters into playful absurdity. Even his apparent condemnations are suspect. “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.” Surely, Wilde himself, with his attraction to the perverse and decadent, found “ugly meanings” no less fascinating than beautiful ones. The line reads less like a law of taste than a mischievous finger pointed at the critics Wilde knew would soon assail him.

That Wilde anticipated moralistic outrage is evident from his subsequent defensive posture during the trials that ruined him. It is tempting to read the Preface, published in 1891, as a preemptive shield against Victorian piety. Yet even here, Wilde’s irony cuts in two directions. On the one hand, he disdains the moralist’s interpretation. On the other, he acknowledges that scandal — and the public's hunger for it — is inseparable from art’s fate. The Preface, like the novel, both demands and derides its own reception.

The Preface's crowning ambiguity lies in its closing salvo: “All art is quite useless.” Taken at face value, it is a slap in the face of utilitarianism. It inverts the Victorian ethos of “improvement” and “moral edification” like a mirror turning sun into shadow. But the line’s irony is double-edged. Declaring art useless is itself a use — a liberation from the chains of didacticism, a rebellion against the notion that art must serve anything outside itself. Wilde transforms uselessness into the highest value, the very definition of spiritual freedom. As Kant wrote in the Critique of Judgment, aesthetic experience is characterized by “purposiveness without purpose.” Wilde’s final aphorism, cloaked in flippancy, thus reveals itself as the most serious claim of all.

Yet, to take even this seriously is to risk missing Wilde’s final joke: the serious and the unserious are never pure in Wilde’s world. Each disguises the other. As Kierkegaard noted in Either/Or, irony is “an infinite absolute negativity,” destroying certainty not by outright contradiction but by perpetual, mischievous instability. Wilde’s Preface dances precisely in this Kierkegaardian space: it seduces us with apparent certainties only to dissolve them into a wry smile.

This method — the deployment of the epigram not as a fixed truth but as an instrument of destabilization — is Wilde’s true genius. In this, he resembles the Sophists of ancient Greece more than the plodding moralists of his own age. Like Gorgias, who declared that “nothing exists,” and if it did, it could not be known or communicated, Wilde’s brilliance lies not in proposing systems but in artfully revealing the cracks in every system. His epigrams are not stepping-stones toward dogma; they are sinkholes opening beneath our feet.

In this light, Wilde’s Preface does not "say" something in the traditional sense. It performs something: the failure of aphorism to contain the multiplicity of life. Every neat antithesis Wilde proposes — beauty versus ugliness, artist versus critic, surface versus depth — collapses under the weight of its own theatricality. Wilde does not offer us a house of philosophy to inhabit; he gives us a house of mirrors in which to lose ourselves.

This performative aspect becomes even more evident when we consider the context of Wilde’s broader oeuvre. In The Critic as Artist, Wilde argues that “the highest Criticism…is more creative than creation.” Here, criticism (traditionally the servant of creation) becomes superior, more imaginative, less constrained. The artist, far from being a pure creator, is revealed as a kind of critic of reality. Thus, when Wilde declares in the Preface that "all art is at once surface and symbol," he gestures toward this collapse: art, like life, is endlessly interpretable — and therefore endlessly elusive.

The ironies of the Preface mirror the ironies of Dorian Gray itself. Dorian, in seeking to preserve surface beauty, destroys the interior life. Yet the painting — the symbol — reveals what the surface hides. In this way, Wilde shows us that surfaces are not innocent: they are charged with latent meanings. To treat the Preface as a simple endorsement of aestheticism, or a simple rejection of morality, would thus be as foolish as treating Dorian’s portrait as a mere ornament.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche warns against the "idiosyncrasy of moralistic interpretations" and praises those rare spirits who can dwell among masks without forgetting that they are masks. Wilde’s Preface demands such readers: those willing to entertain contradictions without rushing to resolution, to savor surfaces without denying their depths.

Thus, to ask whether Wilde is "serious" or "ironic" is to pose the wrong question. He is both, always, inextricably. The genius of the Preface lies in its ability to suspend us within this tension, where thought sharpens itself against thought like blades in the dark. It is not a roadmap but a labyrinth. Its apparent clarity conceals deliberate obfuscation; its aphoristic brilliance mocks the very idea of final wisdom.

In the end, Wilde’s Preface teaches by unteaching. It trains the reader not in what to think, but in how to think — or rather, how to unthink, how to let go of the desire for stable conclusions. Like a Zen koan, it points toward an experience beyond rational grasp, a shimmering region where beauty, irony, sincerity, and mockery intermingle.

If "all art is quite useless," then the Preface is its own best 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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Monday, April 7th 2025 - #1

 

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.