”Niobe, Also, of the Beautiful Hair, Thought of Eating” That is sublime,
In the same way as the free space in the frescoes of Giotto.
–Simone Weil
DEDICATIONS
For those who search blindfolded and find nothing, and for those who are given a chance to find an answer without searching.
For those who look for a new place because they cannot fulfill their energy, and for those who look for a place where life would be more pleasant.
For those who build houses and feel living in them is like living in a waiting-room in a bus stop.
For those who look for more attractive, trendy places, and for those who look for uninteresting places where nobody wants to settle.
For those who can stay anywhere because they feel like a stranger everywhere, and for those who can live everywhere and always feel at home.
For those who get tired of their homes, and for those who never tire of blissful home life.
For those who demolish their houses, and for those who build their homes bit by bit.
For those who construct imagined houses inside physical houses in order to accustom oneself to the space, and for those who in their mind take their houses to pieces to liberate from the illusion of security.
For those who carry their houses in their heart or head.
For those who poses spirit of absence or loss.
INTRO
There hasn’t been any major change in our life, no tragedy occurred. Why then do we feel a need for a change? Why do we start searching? What makes us unable to live in this place anymore?
HOME 1
The roof turned out to be full of holes, there were no windows, the walls are boring and just like everything else, even the “space” where we could build something is absent.
NOTES ON IMPOSSIBLE ARCHITECTURE
Oh, house-builder, you are seen! You will not build this house again!
All your ribs are broken; the roof is destroyed. My mind has reached the
Unconditioned Nirvana, having attained the extinction of all cravings.
–The Dhammapada
You cannot bargain! You cannot think that only reconciling to loss, absence will make you happy and at the same time deceive yourself that it would be somehow possible to build a small, cozy house. Absence and loss are the essence of the world and not something that sometimes happens to us and can be avoided.
It means that one has to train oneself in being here-and-now, regardless what the present time is like and without flavoring it with visions of the future mundane success.
Yes, I know the world of phenomena accessible for our senses is only an illusion, that matter is devoid of substance but maybe as an exception it would be possible to preserve an isle on the sea of emptiness where I could build a little house for myself?
As long as there is some place to flee he’ll be thinking about fleeing. As long as there is a slightest shadow of hope to find some refuge he’ll incessantly be looking for it. When the last light in the tunnel goes out he is terrified, in despair. But when he reconciles with inevitability of his situation he regains peace, gets rid of troubles.
You yourself are this, says Bhagavad Gita. How can you be afraid of yourself? Or decline, refuse?
He still believes in some relief, some better circumstances, in some change to better, in a new beginning. And he cannot see there is nothing different, new, that everything is always the same, understanding that there is no somewhere else, nowhere to flee, is the only relief, he stops searching as he understands there is nothing to search.
The only liberation is liberating from one’s own need to look for liberation, paradise, happiness.
Essay translated into English by Miron Rusek.
Photo of city by Temistocles Arjona