🚀 go-pugleaf

I have always been a passionate person. Layo referred to me as an
intensity addict when she first saw my writings. The Russian idea is
that soul is the truth and the world is evil. In America the idea that
the soul is something to be suppressed or grown out of, so that the
suffocating exploitative rationalism could go on with its task of
destroying and then utilizing people to perpetuate itself.

As a Russian emigre in America, my goal is to combine American optimism
and can-do spirit with Russian passion. To bring alive the soul into
the world. To create this: The triumph of the soul.

And to make it possible for the soulful to live beautifully and
completely. With the goal being this, as I've written during one of my
epiphanies:

-----
For the only thing he wanted in life - his highest value - was
this: a world rich with soul, informed by the soul, and informing the
entirety of matter and structure by the wise, laughing, and radiant
genius of the divine manifest throughhuman and with human craftsmanship
given form.
-----

There are people who think that I'm writing here to get pity,
attention, whatever. In fact I've been brainstorming, sometimes coming
up with useful ideas, discarding others, writing editorials, seeking to
understand and overcome oppression in all its forms, seeking to reach
the people who either are on the same wavelength and can benefit from
my ideas - and of course seeking to make connections with people whom I
can.

I've made and kept friendships that started on the Internet. I've had a
four-year relationship that started on the Internet and then went all
over the country, including to the mansion of a corporate CEO, to
museums and beaches and wine valleys, and then to all kinds of inspired
people who otherwise would have never been in my life. I also had other
romantic stints that started here as well, as well as relations that
did not involve romantic exchanges but inspired poetry and music and
emotional closeness that still lingers to this day.

I came to what I see as the bottom line of inquiry:

IN FLORE VERITAS.

In flower, truth.

Look at a flower. It is not a creature of lines; it is not a creature
of circles. It is a creature that's intricate, delicate, radiant.

There is nothing simple about it. There is nothing linear about it. It
does not exist to be used; it does not exist to use. It exists as a
creature of these two principles:

Consummation and continuity.

Consummation, as the blossoming and unfoldment of its species - the
masterpiece that is its fruition, and from which the species derives
its name.

And continuity, as part of affinity with life - affinity with nature as
a whole.

These two forces, working together, create savor of life - and life
itself.

Either is meaningless in and of itself. Continuity without consummation
leads to perpetuation of misery. Consummation without continuity dies
off. But put them together - and you get life going on for ages and
ages, while producing something worth having existed - worth indeed for
the life to have existed in the first place.

The existence of which justifies the entire enterprise. Creates
something that is of worth in itself - and that meaning and joy to the
entire process.

And that needs the knowledge of its worth (as consummation) and the
continuity of which it is a part to create happiness long-term.

I thought I had conquered such things as possessiveness. I thought I
had been able to come in control of passions so as to be able to know
them, be their master, and not to suppress them or sublimate them or
attack them in others as do so many others (with the result of leaving
the world dry and barren and oppressive), but rather to wield them
masterfully, turn them to poetry, turn them to wisdom, turn them to
full experience of being alive - and in so doing to inspire others to
being fully and absolutely alive.

Alive in passion. Alive to passion. And alive as being informed by the
emotional truth of the romantic soul.

Not to be lost to passion, but to live passionately. With passion
providing the truth of existence - the mind providing the means to make
it manifest.

So when I came across Julia, whose whole being - mind, spirit,
movement, appearance, personality, everything - was luminous, warm,
tender, soft, exquisite and supremely elegant, I knew that I had come
to the consummation of my search.

But I would never have anticipated that in 2005, I would still be
feeling what I am feeling. They say love is sweet. But what I am
feeling is this: It's as though someone is putting a sledgehammer
through my head and through my heart, taking out matter and drilling
all through it until my whole nervous net is screaming and shattering.
It is as though my nervous system becomes a fiddle, with each nerve a
string and the feeling the baton, scratching out rusty tunes. And this
combination of music and agony mingles together, with both of them
feeding into each other - and together being and coming completely
alive. Until art and life become one and the same, with life informing
art, art informing art, and both together building upon each other to
take human experience to ever-higher pitch.

There are many people who want relief or release or arguing out of such
feelings. I don't; I seek to know and feel all of it, and even if a
feeling is hard to handle I want to know it. Will the instrument handle
this degree of passion? Will I be able to craft from it? The picture
says more than a thousand words (unless it's the other way around); but
feeling itself as it is experienced inside is more musical than either
pictorial or verbal. To speak symphonies? To find words that would play
symphonies on the soul of another? To find words that will convey the
same neural experience to the next person? Will all souls experience
the same words in the same way? Or will each person participate in the
creation of their own feeling in the way they participate in creation
of their own meaning, not only interpreting it in their own way but
feeling it their own way? Will the pukey KMFDM gen-X types experience
the same words the same way as the natural romantics, with their nerves
playing the same music inside the head and creating the same
experience?

How can the words be calculated in order to be experienced as a
symphony - the same symphony as played on the nerves of everyone? Or
will it be experienced differently on all, a function of difference of
construction, of thought, of belief, of values, of taste?

The people who see man as sun, woman as moon - or man as light, woman
as dark - know nothing of what they are talking about. Julia is
luminous; I am dark. I refer to her as a cloud of mists and exalted
water through which shines the light of the universe. So how can such
be the feeling for someone who is as luminous? She's been nothing but
wonderful, so why this? What is in me is nothing like sweetness and
light. It is more rightly described as being punched through with a
sledgehammer, breaking the ground of being to pieces and shattering all
the way to the soul.

Drill deeper, drill deeper. Reach, reach through, make it all real.
Almost there. Now. Take the innards and pull them out. Share good stuff
with those who'll make a good use of it for themselves and the next
person (we don't want to waste anything) and take me to where you are.

How do you want me: Fried, boiled, raw or roasted with garlic?

Use your magnificent creativity and find ways to cook a kook.

Tired of seeing the ground?
Look at the eyes of blue.
Spin me, spin me around,
Make my emotions true

Make them soft and tender
Beat them into a pulp
Put them through a blender
And pour into a cup

Set it upon a stove
And simmer and boil
Put in, well-cut, a clove,
Pour in some olive oil

Pour in cayenne and cumin
Pour in pepper and salt.
Tonight for dinner, a human -
Excellent plan to a fault.

Drink this turbid mixture
And when you're nurtured well
Take a beautiful picture 
And renew your spell. 

Ilya Shambat.