failure is essential to living and being

I spent most of my life failing at what I took on. I kept trying, though. 

Early this year, I joined an online group, which seemed to have considerably more substance than what I was seeing at Facebook and Reddit.

Poetic Outlaws

Exegesis of Failure

By: Emil Cioran

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude. For each of us will do anything in order not to be doomed to himself.

Our kind is not a fatality but the temptation to fail. Incapable of keeping our hands clean and our hearts undiluted, we soil ourselves upon contact with strange sweats, we wallow—craving for disgust and fervent for pestilence—in the unanimous mud. And when we dream of seas changed into holy water, it is too late to dive into them, and our advanced state of corruption keeps us from drowning there: the world has infested our solitude; upon us the traces of others become indelible.

In the gamut of creatures, only man inspires a sustained disgust. The repugnance which an animal begets is provisional; it never ripens in thought, whereas our kind obsesses our reflections, infiltrates the mechanism of our detachment from the world in order to confirm us in our system of refusal and non-adherence.

After each conversation, whose refinement alone is enough to indicate the level of a civilization, why is it impossible not to regret the Sahara and not to envy the plants or the endless monologues of zoology? If with each word we win a victory over nothingness, it is only the better to endure its reign.

We die in proportion to the words which we fling around us . . . Those who speak have no secrets. And we all speak. We betray ourselves, we exhibit our heart; executioner of the unspeakable, each of us labors to destroy all the mysteries, beginning with our own.

And if we meet others, it is to degrade ourselves together in a race to the void, whether in the exchange of ideas, schemes, or confessions. Curiosity has provoked not only the first fall but the countless ones of every day of our lives. Life is only that impatience to fall, to fail, to prostitute the soul’s virginal solitudes by dialogue, ageless and everyday negation of Paradise.

Man should listen only to himself in the endless ecstasy of the intransmissible Word, should create words for his own silences and assents audible only to his regrets. But he is the chatterbox of the universe; he speaks in the name of others; his self loves the plural. And anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

Politicians, reformers, and all who rely on a collective pretext are cheats. There is only the artist whose lie is not a total one, for he invents only himself. Outside of the surrender to the incommunicable, the suspension amid our mute and unconsoled anxieties, life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

The implicit plural of “one” and the avowed plural of “we” constitute the comfortable refuge of false existence. Only the poet takes responsibility for “I,” he alone speaks in his own name, he alone is entitled to do so.

Poetry is bastardized when it becomes permeable to prophecy or to doctrine: “mission” smothers music, idea shackles inspiration. Shelly’s “generous” aspect cripples most of his work; Shakespeare, by a stroke of luck, never “served” anything.

The victory of non-authenticity is fulfilled in philosophical activity, that complacence in “one,” and in prophetic activity [whether religious, moral, or political], that apotheosis of “we.”

Definition is the lie of the abstract mind; inspired formula the lie of the militant one; a definition is always the cornerstone of a temple; a formula inescapably musters the faithful. Thus all teachings begin. How then fail to turn to poetry? It has, like life, the excuse of proving nothing.)

Thinking Cioran was quite the chatterbox himself, I volunteered some of my own chatter.

Sloan Bashinsky

How about?

spiritual bipolar disorder,

the cause of all

human ails,

including wars,

if the demons aren't counted

spiritual bi polar disorder,

the destruction of the

south pole,

the feminine,

the north pole,

he ain't been

right in the head

since she's been gone

Sloan Bashinsky

I can't find anything about Cioran being poet. I did find more stuff about him assessing poets.

Poetic Outlaws Author

He wasn't a poet. He was a philosopher who wrote poetically. 

 

Sloan Bashinsky

I gather he wasn’t a mystic, either. Yet, he seemed in what you posted here to hold forth on both topics, as if he was an expert or blessed with all-knowing, yet how could that be, if he was not a poet nor a mystic, asks a poet and a mystic?

Poetic Outlaws Author

I think his wisdom came from beyond even the mystics and the poets. He was brilliant. 

Sloan Bashinsky

I’ve known lots of brilliant people, far smarter than me, who had no clue, were not able to grasp, nor appreciate, nor even believe I wasn’t making up what little I told them of what I had experienced that was not of this world, and they were just as tone death to small amounts of reams of poetry that had leaped out of me. Had similar experience with quite a few poets, yet not with all the poets I crossed paths with.

Back in my own "time zone"...

In early 1987, out of bright ideas, at the end of my rope, feeling I had failed in every way a man could fail, I made a desperate prayer:

"Dear God, I do not want do die like this, failed. Please help me." I paused, then added, "I offer my life to human service." 

Something fluttered inside of me, tears came into my eyes. It passed. I went on about my day.

About ten days later, I awoke in the wee hours, saw two spirit beings shaped like white shifts hovering above me in the darkness. I heard, not with my ears, but quite clearly:

"This will push you to your limits, but you asked for it and we are going to give it to you." 

I saw a white flash and my body and psyche was jolted by something electrical. That happened two more times. The two beings faded out. I was physically shaking and sweating. 

Slowly but inexorably, I was turned every upside down, inside out, and every which a way but loose. I was stood before many mirrors. My perspective of everything, including myself, changed, and kept changing, as the process continued.

In April 2001, when I again felt like total, abject failure, a poem fell out of me as fast as I could type it.

The World's Greatest Failure

I know what it is to love fully,

have my heart broken by death

and by loved ones' rejections,

Over and over again,

so I can love even more.

I know what it is to be engulfed in pain,

Awash in evil,

Terrified, enraged, despaired,

Believing God has again forsaken me,

Then be given the truth

that again makes me free.

I know what it is to doubt,

Be lost and wandering

time and time again,

Then be rescued yet again

and my faith grows deeper.

I know what it is to blindly trust,

Then be destroyed by betrayal

time and time again,

Until I trust only God.

I know what it is to have much

and be completely of this world,

Then have it all taken away

and be in the world but not of it.

I know what it is to fail in this world,

and fail and fail and fail:

The world's greatest failure,

I can serve only God.

I know what it is to give

and give and give and give;

I cannot stop giving

because giving is receiving.

I know what it is to explain God

time after time after time again.

Something demands I keep explaining:

Maybe someone will listen,

Maybe me.

The irony of having prayed in early 1987, for God to deliver me from my own failure, did not escape me. 

Yet, what is failure, really? 

Who, or what, decides?

I read online the other day, that nobody achieves anything, who does not fail many times. Failing is essential to living and being.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com