Toward Eternity

Humanity is not a thing you achieve by giving. It is something that is given to you.

Are scientists the poets of the natural world or are poets scientists of the imagined world?

I am remembering a thing, not of the past, but a thing that is yet to come. What is memory anyway? Memory is as much a product of the present as it is the past. Created with the perspectives of the present, the colors and limitations and lacunae of the present. Just as history is written by the victors, as the cliché goes, so too do the victors own the future. Who is to say we do not create memories out of the future as well? That the echo of an event doesn’t go both ways?

Language contains our knowledge and at the same time fails to contain it. All it really contains is our performance of control. And yet, we persist.

What is DNA but lines in a narrative of our lives? What else is all our code? Our literature? They exist before we do. We exist to perpetuate them. To perpetuate story. We are mere vehicles. We tell a story with our bodies, our lives, then we die. The story lives on.

Writing is a public act, but is there ever a more private one? Could there ever be a more delicious sensation than the intimacy with the page, a better partner in any sin or crime than the white expanses, the undiscovered country, the unspoiled future where we can pretend for a moment that there are no Redundants, no Immortals, no echoes from the past, poetic, genetic, nanotechnological or otherwise? But the moment we lift the pen, the moment we use language, laden as it is with the past, with the victors of conquests and the blood of the vanquished, all the ghosts come flooding back, and we drown.

I had wanted to know what it would be like to be human. I knew it now. It made me want to die.

The narrative in this notebook, told over hundreds of years, and through the words of many individuals, constitutes as single story. We belong to it, it does not belong to us. None of our stories belong to us. What is DNA, but lines in the narrative of our lives?

I was haunted for a long time. I accepted this as the price to pay for being human, for being alive. Even Adam came from god, and we all come from someone. We are all haunted.

What else can we be but stories about ourselves that we tell ourselves?

You want something that is yours. Something that makes you you and no other. I lost the shell. But I have that memory. I lost the emotion, but I have the memory of the emotion. I still have the story of it. And that’s enough. That’s all the ownership I need. I’ve learned I need nothing else for me to be me. Just the memory and the story.

People needed time. People were trying their best. People needed respect. This last part was crucial. Respect from and for others was what made people people.

Endings create meanings. Death is the eternal generator of meanings, for it is only in death that any new thing can arise, even if that new thing is oblivion, entropy... Life is toxic; like all toxins, in small doses it cures, in large ones it proves fatal.

Music is as eternal as the universe, it is part of its very fabric, and a musician is only picking at a small corner of the universe, a tiny dot in it., when they turn air and time into sound. A musician's task is not to create sound from nothingness; a true musician understands that music is the primordial state of the universe, the very first world, and silence is a cloak imposed upon this state, and a musician's job is to create a tear in that cloak to let out the music underneath. We do not create music, we draw it out from underneath the silence.

Whether a life ends happily or sadly, what does it matter but the weight of the emotions one felt, the weight of the clarity of all the meaningful moments one possessed while living on this Earth, whether they have been good or bad? Is it not the weight, in the end, that really makes us human after all?

The poetic portrait is not a representation of the self but the self itself. Poetry does not ‘uncover’ who we are, it does not ‘bring us closer’ to who we are, it does not help us ‘express’ ourselves. Poets are artists who write selves into being.

I am Yonghun Han, and I am not. Prasert loved me, and he did not. The me that I was before this body disappeared—that was the Yonghun that Prasert loved. I am only the body that came back. I am the recursion, the vessel necessary for the love to return, a love so great it has overcome the death of its previous vessels to live in this world again, searching for what it had lost. I am the body buried in a body, I had buried my redundant-self in my nanodroid-self. My cells in my nanites. But the memories buried in my code passed on from my redundant-self to my nanodroid body, and that was what had been waiting between the lines to be read out again. To tell its narrative.

Psych is a mortal whom the god Eros falls in love with. She is given ambrosia on Mount Olympus and weds Eros as a god.” “I’ll be up for tenure in a few years. Does that count?

Sometimes, it seemed like the authors were treating language like it was its own creature. A creature that fed, grew, died, and was reborn again. Language was not a tool to them, more like an occasionally useful parasite.

To write a story about someone is to create someone.

Sometimes, I feel that these poems, while they come from the past… somehow, they also come from the future. Especially this one. Like I am overhearing someone in the future, whispering poems into a time-wind, and I am remembering not a thing that is past but a thing that is yet to come.

Hope is a terrible thing. It makes you sink ever deeper into the darkness.

Was not every piece of music “4’33,” never a rendition sounding alike, with each element of chance affecting the dynamics, the receptions, the discovery of the music in the room? Was not the machinery of change as much part of the music as the musician?

I looked at poetry to see how it constructs the idea of a person… Poets are artists who write selves into being…. Poetry makes us all into magicians.