Hyaena Fierling Reich (Chasing what you’ll never know)

FRAGMENTS FROM "VREIA" 2011

1. subjective – objective Castor and Pollux feed the morning need for a fix against patience, suffering, despair. the morning air cools down the fevers of the night, spent in half-lucid precocious dreamland, long lost memories kept aflame by the thin, muslin-like matter of dreams. waking shouldn’t be so hard - but after months waking way too early it’s always sweet to stay in bed dreaming away. awake, no more of the lucid hallucinations, and motions seem to follow the pace of invisible flying fish wandering about. the walls of noise now clearer, the scream of the city far away, and melding into the core of daytime reality is now an easy task. but still the morning blues cling, like a heavy damp satin gown, and hurried I try to shoo them off, away from the nuclear fields where I dwell.

2. subjective Chasing what you’ll never know. chastising the desires you have no idea what to do. a man, alone, tenderly chases the ghosts of his memory. it is not in fear that we dwell in strange places, haunted by a thousand nightmares we know not the beginning nor the end. infatuated in poison, shuddering at bizzarre thoughts, irises gleam as the shadows dance and move in front of us. no one sleeps tonight. it was the ghost of an irrepressible desire - the shadow of the hunt for an implacable desire - that held us down, still shivering, covered in sweat, eyes flooding with tears of emotion facing our own naked reflexions in the antimonium mirrors. Away from the shadows cast, hunters for dreams chase the ghosts memory did left behind, still gleaming, still panting, still breathing. a quest without end, a desire that shall not leave these bodies until their last breath. a man, alone, tenderly chases the infatuated ghosts of his own melancholy. He walks into an ocean. I am the ocean.

4. objective The train turns and turns again, in an endless journey that never seems to stop. drops by in every station, millions of people get in and out, only you remain sitting down, watching carelessly by the window, until something gets your eye and you follow it. the noise of the carriages takes you away almost until you get sleepy. stations come and stations go and it’s as if your journey had no end, because you never get up to leave. until the last station. it’s a wrap. you get off the train and get into another train into a different destination, but always inside a train, never leaving until the last station. and in the last station you leave into another train into another last station. running away through the map, journeying through the land with no other destination than unknown. looking for a stranger to join you somewhere. they never seem to arrive. but there you go. hopeful of your desire and grace. 

6. subjective awake, torn away from the thick veil of sleep that tears apart the eyes like luminous beams of the morning sun. winds across the globe never stop - how strong is the spirit - how strong is the soul. passing rooms quietly, ghostlike, eventually entering one or another in sheer curiosity to find treasures of old scattered here and there. the pavement is lukewarm under the bare feet and one foot stumbles, aching, don’t know why. the steps become slightly difficult, a lame walk that reminds of one’s own mortality and how fickle vanity is. all things transitory yet so eternal. the illusion of whatever lasts forever, not

gone, but clinging on the thin string that holds a heart suspended in the air thickened by the vapour of warm blood. it was not now that the third eye opened into lucidity. it was somewhere in time that she decided to never go back to where she dwelt, the obstinate innocence that brought with it tremendous wounds. but if you got enough naivete and if you’ve got conviction then innocence is burning for you. your face, faded into white and alive in my memory, crashes against a thousand mirrors of uncanny fragility that break into million pieces. yet not disfigured, just made real by the contemplation of divine forms, done in fear of being caught and between timespaces where time itself becomes denser and thicker, hectic in its daily routine of more of the same. time leaps forward in an unbeatable speed, and we but grow older. the grinders cease, the almond tree blooms. not getting any younger. Castor and Pollux relieve the morning blues and remind - again- of one’s own mortality like a freshly crowned Caesar. but it is the light coming by the window that reminds that there is still a thin hope, something inbetween despair and suffering, its name is patience. the mother of all desperate waitings. learn patience and understand. the only strenght available to fight despair.

8. objective slowly falls the evening. he is alone in his office. alone, most lonely than anyone else in the world. between clouds of smoke which volutes around him he contemplates…an icon, an image of God, something very sacred, very holy. something, a figure surrounded Herself by volutes of smoke. the same that surrounds him. there he stands, across the years, afraid to reach Her, to speak to Her, contemplating Her in silence. in awe, not knowing the very ancient Geomantic law that he who lost his money lost nothing, that he who lost his love lost something, but he who lost his courage lost everything. where is his courage? died somewhere through the years. though his hair blooms in white already and wrinkles start to show, he is still the blond youngin stumbling in the palace of the mermaid.  and always scared to shatter and abandon routine, the same routine that chains him, a slave to the grind. eternal wanderer, he drinks from an alcohol mire that stinks from a distance. still he hunts his ghosts, still he chases. a man of no sighs. so slowly falls the night. he confines in his cloister of souls to contemplate Her. the only being that can save him from the elusive routine of work home work. with Her, he could be free forever. but does he even believe in real freedom. in what country could he be well received. in what country could anyone offer him true understanding. there are tears in his eyes and a letter in his hand. silent, mute, he worships Her from afar.  the blond youngin in the palace of the mermaid exists no more. but the man of the grey eyes of faith, he still exists.

12. subjective the saints who remain to be seen dwell not in altars, but somewhere inbetween where invisibility cloaks them in hues of strange colours and the sight of the common man reaches them not. few recognize them - and pilgrim to them in awe like migrant birds seeking for a new home in a continent far away. there is an archaic village by the shores of a cold sea where an invisible saint wanders about. the wind in her hair is the same that ran centuries, ages ago, in the inhabitants of that village. the stones are older than her and me, one day she’ll be released from the weight of mortality.

15. subjective – objective I ceased to ask for the nature of this abandonment. I feel, only, the quiet scavenger memory is, harking at my back; I see the folds of my open heart and how the soul (or its shadow) extends itself through a shore of centuries past; I see my footsteps in the wet sand and tell myself: I don’t know myself no longer, yet I accept myself. Still the morning lights can surprise me. I stop at the center of the square near my house and throw the dice freely, desireless of a lucky number.

II... my life, my naked white body, a knife, a man and his fists and may my heart not survive to the attack.

III.... the steppes were covered in snow and the black horses ran freely. the fox and her intelligent nose. I can’t hear the resound coming from the steamy Amur. is the fog growing - or my white hair thrown by the night wind? the patience that vodka brings me. I hope the shadow that I cast protects me from being arrested at the border. again the green deers lower down to my well and stare in my eyes sweetly before eating one by one the red flowers and the half bitten orange Cataclypsa left behind.  

IV. …and once I looked again at the promised land, the earthly goods and the loss, at last, of a rest to which I renounce; knowing that my soul can spin and glow - and me with her - in an abstract yet certain spiral, without destiny, without precise fugue or found origin or that I may be seen or pointed out; maybe by a silver finger. from behind an opaque crystal - something like the image of the sky to the ancient - a strong affirmation of all that is disgrace, rebellious and unkind, cursed-…with all this and since none of this affects me - I mean my time and its metaphors; the perplexity of being and…- I take my own life and put an end to my days trusting to lose the traces of myself, dreaming sleeping, sleeping; sleeping in a desolating lethargy - just like a day offered by excellent wine - that then someone may inhabit and circle my fragile inert body and may bench my ghosts, so alive, implacable enemies of…

V... that first night I was afraid; I listened to my heart for hours, the coming and going of my blood by obscure and fragile paths, my bones becoming smaller. the next night I imitated the sounds of my favorite animals (the lion, perhaps; the wounded wolf) and strolled through the courtyard in an apron while I spoke with my dead father. the night arrived hand in hand with the day, and the day, estranged in its uniformity, took strange tones unknown to me and sealed the windows of my house. my eyes are red globes and large hands cover my face, but I keep reading a book that never ends and that never has been written.... the sky passes, the tempests. if only I could speak to men

my stories would be all the same; the sky passes, the tempests. I am my own dog and I hear a strange music with my ear at my owner’s grave. I am my own dog and the earth is naked. like the graveyards I pass by looking for my owner. what do I care for the sky that passes, the tempests. nobody knows that I am dead and each night I come back to earth. to gnaw the bones of the living.

VII... they say it is now really that a time begins that is free of any chronolic mirage; that there is no other government but the one of the firmly forgotten memories; the silence of the souls, burials at sea and the coldest of mirrors. Well. I am not scared of the discipline that eternity may impose me.

VIII... what other glories could grace me but those that give me the bliss of being known and respected by my neighbour and her serious husband, the so lovely lady that sells me the milk, the bread and some vegetables of her courtyard and the waiter that has never known my name but knows my love for the rosy wine when the afternoon is over and everything ceases to be as hostile as daylight. what glory to never having participated in any death in history and to completely ignore the faces that come on tv screens and say the world is like this or that. what more glory than the books I read and forget so quickly, the jazz-band I listen in the radio or the strange love of a man from Coventry from whom I do not know for years still I love somehow, and really doesn’t know much about the simplicity of my radious day after days.

IX... one day, by your side, I shall cook no more. one day, by your side, I shall work no more. with my daughters and sons I shall not speak; only see them as they enter and leave the rooms. I shall make minimal work; adjust the radio dial, record a thunderstorm, pick a ladybird from the ground, pronounce your companion’s name part after part so that the faded memory of old age won’t fracture me.

X... each inch of my skin is an anticipation of a disappearance that never ceases to accomplish itself. the hours or days, I don’t know. years. my homeland has no limits and is a great fire, in its flames and in its embers. I resist quietly, only to make it a point to the mathematicians of death. a bird - what bird? - beats its wings above me.

XI... well is death. welcome the sharp knife that opens and refreshes the vein; the hand that drowns and remembers an obscure original pain of the bullet that seeks for the heart and finds it already broken.  my image bleeds over the dagger’s blade; my rings in the fingers of that hand and my initials carved at the base of that silvery death. I kill and I love my habits. I bite the apple and the fruit never sours. X.. I am a man of the future, but I belong to the past because each night I secretly open my veins and I listen to the open murmur of my life. it was written that I would be the Alcalde of a small village near a borderline. sitting in the rocks I wrote fair laws and heard the lamentations of women and men. I brought snows to these lands to captivate and taught remote languages to my people that could only use them in games and tricks. I drank the warm wine under the planets of the night and thought about crossing the ocean and come back with a thousand coloured parrots that could make my home rejoice. I have always been serene even if I never really understood what time is. now, after I have written all the tragic myths in the flesh of a woman who speaks to me for thirty thousand years now, since the dawn of time, a part of me wants to bury her in the most sterile of grounds and another part of me wants to hold her in my arms

until we both die. I am a Christ that makes the revolution and is afraid that everything, life - life - is not an unforgettable matter.

XI have had many lives. I have traveled with cases and without cases; alone and in company; to run away or to make place for myself. I know half world and the other half either does not exist or it is marshy waters unworthy of being visited. I have labored in all kinds of labors, suffering terrible masters that only gave me a ceiling, hard bread and half a cup of water to drink and wash myself (even if I had to steal them to survive; also to kill their sons who came to my bed at midnight to demand violent love from me). I have lived many lives. I remember almost all of them. I remember them all, yes. words very close to each other and repeated kisses. yes, I could have done much more. today I sit at the gate of my own life: a little boy eats sugar cane and finishes a game under a ripe grapevine. the zeppelin opens the voyage of the travelling birds in the sky.