Introduction:
Hey everyone. If you follow me on Bluesky, you know that I had a plan to bring in a guest writer. That plan is in action today. Today's article is completely written by someone not me. My partner would rather not be named when credited for their articles, so I will only be calling them My Partner on this blog. I hope you enjoy.
"My life itself is my prayer"
By, My Partner
What my name is does not matter. Where I come from does not matter.
This writing is merely fragments — not insignificant ones, but pieces that form part of who I am. Over the years, they sometimes appear childish, sometimes bitter, sometimes unreasonable.
I even accept, with a touch of vanity and no trace of humility, these labels: Blanchot, Weil, Bataille, Kundera, Camus, mysticism, materialism, God…
One day, the ground collapsed. Among the mound of soil around you, you discovered a beam of faint light, which illuminated the end of your gaze.
I stood up. The curtains were drawn, yet the sunlight clung to the windows and filled the room. There was something there I could no longer bear. The heat? Yes, the heat, and this light: it had the watery dullness and persistence that flows where there is an opening, seeps through where there is none; it spreads over hours, days, centuries, just like water.
Behind the windowpane, turbid water flows, converging from all directions as if it might seep outside. With its unsettling fluid transparency in motion, it steadily supplants the rigid clarity of the glass.
Eyes open, yet asleep — resting on the thinking sponge, warm and gentle. I’ve never felt such stillness before, so deep that the one speaking or typing felt like another — a separate being living inside me, both sharply critical and utterly endearing.
Everyone will live until the night when love is fully completed.
Nevertheless, the pen remains the sharpest spear, and the book the sturdiest shield. It brings to mind this passage from Maurice Blanchot: No matter how unfortunate we believe ourselves to be, as long as we still reign over it, we remain comfortably situated within it. From this perspective, writing is the greatest violence — for it usurps all laws, every law, even its own.
Life is a scream which one cannot desire to ameliorate. It is rather that one would exacerbate it. Agony alone has the power to seduce us. and it is to our most savage torments that we most ardently cling, we know that a life which was not torched into charcoal by desire would be an unendurable insipidity. (Pain, however, remains pain. A word that is easily written. Perhaps there is little point in remarking upon it. One could imagine innumerable spurious reasons for reiterating the word 'scream' for instance. That life itself is filthy hurt... who could care about this being discussed? Everyone and no-one' as Nietzsche suggests?)
At its root literature is writing for nothing, a pathological extravagance whose natural companions are poverty, ill-health, mental instability, and all the other symptoms of a devastated life that is protracted in the shadow of futility. In the current organization of civilization the facility of contacting a text is---- at the very least ----radically accidental with respect to its literary intensity. The bare minimum of honesty requires an acknowledgement that literature is spent almost entirely unattended. It is as foreign to us in our social being as an earthquake beneath the sea.
“When one attempts to interpret existence as something borne through daily life, the notion of creation becomes unacceptable.”
Memory is the present that never ceases to fade. —Octavio Paz
The value of life can only be resistance and revolt expressed with all the energy of despair. And this despair itself is a great love of life, of true human values and great instinctive forces, of all that we experience. Countless moments, like fireworks, flash before my eyes:
Last night, as I was driving home from the parking lot after work, I had forgotten to turn on my headlights. Just after I exited the gate, a security guard about 20 meters away shouted urgently: "Hey! You forgot to turn on your lights! Turn them on! Turn them on! Quickly! Drive safely!"
Tears immediately welled up in my eyes — all because of a stranger's kindness.
On a winter night, a dog ran out of an alley and kept going forward without looking back. It entered a house, and I smiled. Such an ordinary thing, yet it healed my heart. The dog, too, had a home, an internal clock — it was in a hurry to return. It ran, not walked.
Through the night we gallop on a somber mare, scattering blue ears of grain across the fields. —Pablo Neruda
"Poetry drips onto the heart like dew moistening the pasture grass."
Early morning, the road was wet and glistening. Rain, too, is a playful artist — painting the ground with dark, wide ribbons. I walked along this path of art, surrounded by the scent of wood that only winter brings, and the sweet fragrance of sleeping soil, like the scent of milk. Suddenly, the rain picked up again. I hurried; then it stopped, and I slowed down. Soon, heavy rain poured like beans. It was like a brief romance I had with the winter rain.
Yesterday, I finally moved all my treasured possessions to the new house. Back in the old place, my parents had no idea how many books I actually owned. My mom thinks three books are enough for a lifetime. But when I packed them up and asked my dad to help carry them downstairs, he opened my door, took one look, and gave me the most baffled look. He said, “Are you running a library or something?” then was practically speechless. Honestly, it’s not even that many — just six large boxes in total.
My goal is simple: earn more money to buy more books. In fact, the whole reason I bought this new place was because of them. My sense of security has always come from my books.
A kind word slipped out like a sigh of contentment.
A familiar, serene restlessness. It’s been a month since I moved out on my own. Now back at my parents’ place for the holiday, I found myself alone this morning—both of them had gone out. I read quietly for a while, then lay down to nap. Half-drowsing, I heard piano notes drifting from the neighbor on the left, the rhythmic chopping of firewood from the right, and the faint sounds of a soap opera from across the street.
I never quite fell asleep, yet those comfortable noises wrapped around me like a lullaby. I opened my eyes and saw fragments of golden sunlight filtering through my mom’s new lace curtains, falling gently across the table—as though the light itself was peeking quietly into this vast, lazy stretch of holiday tranquility.
An autumn breeze rustled the plants outside the door, carrying their soft, raspy whisper. Everything felt so beautifully still.
It got colder today. On the chilly night road, everyone was rushing home for a bowl of dumplings. Halfway there, I noticed the cars ahead were moving unusually slowly, and I muttered a curse under my breath. When several cars bypassed from the left, I turned right and saw an elderly woman riding a bicycle with a bundle of candied hawthorns strapped to the back. She pedaled silently with her head down, clearly in the wrong lane.
Can she see well? Has she eaten dinner? Where is she going? Is she cold? Is she alone? I felt deeply ashamed of those words I had uttered.
At noon, I sank into sorrowful contemplation and wrote half a poem. I didn’t finish it—work suddenly came up, and after I was done, it was time to clock off. I won’t continue it tomorrow. Sorrowful contemplation is meaningless.
This night awaits us, permeates us; we must continue to frustrate its expectation — only thus is it night. —Jacques Dupin, The Climb
In the utter silence, I seem to have grown accustomed to facing this empty little house alone. The road ahead is long—I’m not curious about what lies further down. I simply focus on what’s before me, then lose myself in books. That’s my dull life. Yes, I like using the word “dull.”
I bought several books yesterday; they arrived today. They’re by Simone Weil. She’s a subdued presence—the first time she’s come to dwell on my bookshelf.
I haven’t given up on the idea of a cat. One day, I will have one! I’ve already picked out a name: Hegel.
I am thinking of two lines by Char:
I love that which dazzles me and then deepens the obscurity within me.
We can only live in half-openness, precisely on the bewildering borderline between light and dark.
Just now, I saw an elderly lady opening her wallet and counting money. It reminded me of a scene from three years ago: an old man in his eighties or nineties went to the bank to collect his pension. He held a thin stack of banknotes, sat down, smoothed them one by one, neatly stacked them, opened an envelope folded from newspaper, carefully slid them inside, and then placed it into a plastic bag. What moved me was not so much the neatness, but his slow, deliberate movements—as if he had entered into a kind of sacred pact, almost like an act of faith, with those bills.
I would rather walk the tightrope than tread on the creaky wooden plank. Perhaps I know too well what kind of monster lurks beneath the gaps, what fate awaits the plank—rot away, decay until it falls apart. The tightrope, on the other hand, carries only one risk: the chance of slipping and falling. Just like the little girl encountered: she was destined to step forward, yet had to choose the plank. Laure said, Will I ever be able to leave a trace of will in the real! As soon as I am no longer alone, I am no longer myself, what to do? Will I always have this immense faculty to suffer things without changing them?
Burn myself out and immerse wholeheartedly in life but burning yet whole. It should end here in Nietzsche: Everything that appears necessary when viewed from above and from the perspective of a general economy also serves the self. One should not only endure it—one should love it.
Valley of Mexico
“Day stretches its transparent body. Light tied to the sunstone strikes me with its invisible great hammer. I am but a pause between two tremors: a living point where two glances that ignore each other meet within me, sharp and calm. Has it allied? I am pure space, a site. Through my body, I see my other body. The stone gives off light. The sun tears out my eyes. Two stars comb their red feathers in my empty sockets. Splendor, the whirl of wings and a fierce sharp beak. Now, my eyes sing. Look into their song, leap into the blaze.”
—Octavio Paz
You envelop me in caresses as ivy envelops a melancholy wall. —Pablo Neruda
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