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Sybrand Veeger

Poetry ROOTS - MAR/APR 2019 Sybrand Veeger

Expansion and Contraction

Written by Sybrand Veeger

Expansion and Contraction:

I wasn’t the first to observe:
Nature expands through light
And contracts through gravity.

If this is nature’s music, her chordal root,
I’d like to dig deeper,
To play further:

Time’s movement cannot be linear.
It must follow the reality of light and gravity.

Perhaps timelessness, infinity,
Could be thought to resemble contraction.
Maybe timeliness, finitude,
Could be thought to resemble expansion.

What lives, grows and dies, is that which expands,
That which swells reality.
What is and is perpetually, energy, for instance,
Bears upon the finite,
Forcing it to yield,
Like gravity does on light!

The Spirit and Matter of history,
As Hegel and Marx observed respectively,
Dance tango to a pulsing beat:
The rhythm of Time’s dialectical feet.

If we listen closely to the music of history,
We detect its movements:

The allegro of Antiquity,
An adagio in early christianity,
A lentando into the middle age,
And a renaissance crescendo into an enlightened revolution – Accelerando!

Then modernity produced industry,
Which in turn swelled inequality,
Poverty, crooked morality:
The total misery of humanity.

Although there’s some delight in science, technology, globality!
Thanks to which nationality has lost some gravity.

History, then, moves accordingly:
Like an atom, chord and strings,
Expansively and contractively.

There are some tunes left in the chord root of Nature:

The body, human or otherwise,
Follows the tempo of a pump:
The neck’s pulse, the heart’s thump,
Allows for breath to dance likewise.

Exhalations, inhalations,
The vibrations, my pulsations.
Expansions and contractions
At the core of all sensations.

All that’s left is the spirit, the mind,
I hope it tango’s á la divine.
Jonas Guigonnat MICRO CHANGES - JAN/FEB 2019 Prose Sybrand Veeger

CHAOS: A SCHIZOLOGUE

Written by Jonas Guigonnat and Sybrand Veeger

“The canals are quiet, the streets are almost empty.

Nothing disturbs the water, not even its own chaotic movement.

It’s one of those late winter nights that the city offers as a pause to tortured souls.

The stream whispers that things and lives are meaningful, that fearing death is meaningless.

How soothing are the whispers, the illusions of stability and of meaning!

Yet a volcanic Chaos boils underneath the calm, impenetrable surface,

It boils laughing at us, underneath this surface-screen through which we see the world,

It boils in deep laughter!

We might as well take more drugs now,

The effect is ultimately as fictitious as the freedom to choose not to…”

“Wait! Don’t forget that we can think!

Say that order, meaning, coherence

Are just the layers of a screen that we can’t penetrate  –

Say that freedom, causality, science, beauty are but figments on this screen

Merely illusions –

Say that All is really Chaos!

Aren’t we part of All?

Aren’t we laughing too through our thinking?

Ha! This makes sense! We’re Chaos laughing at itself!”

“The stature of the houses accentuates the holograms of order and balance!

Great, intricate, ancient structures of…. nothing but stone and wood –

Products of human history, of a mighty and wealthy past – of a Golden Age!

…produced by blood, fish, tulips, crosses, and crowns:

Merely coincidences, pure randomness…

And we trust in the stability of their construction,

And we indulge in the fake progressive sequence of their production,

Mythological fabrications of nothing but stuff?

Acknowledging the unceasing chaos – isn’t this too much for us to bear?”

“Yes! All will always be too much!

Because the flow of the stream is the flow in us,

Because the shaking water particle mirrors our spirit in flux.

How vital, how life-affirming,

How profoundly calming is the necessary randomness of the world,

What are time, progress, history, if what’s real is

The purity of Chaos –

If only there was more!

And that we sense it, that we can sing it with our thinking:

We are but the world singing to itself!”

“Enter me cabalistic cannabis!

Mend my fractured mind with fumes of clairvoyance and mystique!”

“And now that you’ve given me what I’ve wished for,

I’m rid of illusions – of false and destructive conclusions.

I see how disgusting we are,

Surrounded by impenetrable screens that project unreal meaning,

Unreal order, unreal time, unreal history, unreal truth, unreal contact:

Ticking, scrolling, tapping away – how thoughtless and banal!

Are we bound to this self-made nutshell and

Pointless dot in the vastness of Chaos?”

“Yes! Bounded in this very nutshell,

We can crown ourselves kings of infinite space!

For we participate in vastness,

For we too, like the world, are ever changing!

No order, no system, no symmetry, no history, no rationality:

What more can you wish for?

Now nothing holds us back from affirming Chaos!”

MICRO CHANGES - JAN/FEB 2019 Poetry Sybrand Veeger

Heraclitus and “I”

Written by Sybrand Veeger

To the skies he cried,

Nothing is but fire!

Observing thus that everything is change.

He knew that God-or-Nature had but one desire:

To stay in flux, to stay in flow, to re- and rearrange!

Nothing ever stands, for the cosmos eternally will dance:

Being’s moves are both random and necessary,

For the beat is chaotic yet perpetually voluntary.

One never steps into the same river twice,

Whispered our Greek identifying parallel streams:

The river flows and so do I,

Observing thus that “I” is something else than what it seems:

There is no meaningful, purposeful or essential “I,”

Or a “self” to be developed as a self-contained existence;

Rather life’s basic playfulness is unwise to deny!

If at every instant “I” returns as another

and as an other,

Self is a ceaseless repetition of different others to discover:

If this morphing game is a play of masks

Like an inwardly theatre with no future, with no past,

We should conclude that self’s a stream                                                                       or a perpetual come-and-go,

That there is no truthful state that will one day lead the show –

So?

Unfold all masks!

Release all fire!

Let us play!

Let us dance! – to the cosmic beat’s desire.

MICRO CHANGES - JAN/FEB 2019 Prose Sybrand Veeger Uncategorized

Cries of Flux

Written by Sybrand Veeger

Everything is flux or energy or motion or fire or change so

Everybody is beat, pulse, thump, pump, thump, pump, rush!

I sometimes feel and listen to my neck’s pulse on the pillow when I’m half asleep while imagining my skin translucent I watch my blood race in shoots from my heart to my heart to my heart roaring through ventricles and valves and chambers and pipes and pistons self-orchestrating the fiery flux of this sanguine concerto in thick red minor to which I tend to dream of dancing in straight cardiac tempo echoed by a chorus that inhales and exhales and expands and contracts while inflating sacks of airy oxygen producing exhalations of life and thought and memories and words and dreams and causing inhalations ad absurdum finitum finitum finitum finitum!

“Stop! Bodies never stand still! Accept the bloody fire of flesh!”

Everything is flux or energy or fire or stream or change so

Every soul’s motion parallels the flow of breath and blood!

I sometimes stand beside my spirit’s stream to observe the ebbing flow of consciousness covered by surface currents made of perceptions coloring the mental water that rushes rainbow-dyed by the senses and is carried through by an undercurrent of fears and anxieties and joys and excitements causing the tide of this river of subjectivity which direction is determined by imagination and which flooding is seldom barred by the weak dams of rational thought!

“Stop! Minds never stand still! Accept the perpetual stream of spirit!”
Jonas Guigonnat Poetry Sybrand Veeger TRANSFORMATIVE TECHNOCRATS - December 2018

What Would A Technecracy Look Like?

Written by Sybrand Veeger and Jonas Guigonnat

Sybrand:

There is something romantic about an etymological voyage,
Something utopically revealing –
The feeling is akin to tracing back your genealogical roots:
Familiarizing yourself with familiarity,
Fathoming alternative familiarities:
Unearthing roots
To imagine trees.

Let me share a genealogical log with you:

This time Heidegger was my guide,
That German Virgil of meaning –
We sailed down into the etymological piths of technology,
That timeliest of concepts.

Currently, he said while descending,
Techno means something radically different from its Greek root:
Techne signifies something other than
Instrumental manipulation,
The obsession with means,
The encasing and concealment of nature.

Techne, rather, is not opposed to nature –
The craftsman, artisan, manufacturer,
Akin to the poet and the painter,
Brings forth a creation,
And, like nature’s disclosure of light,
The technecrat reveals,
un-conceals.

From this root, I imagine a tree,
I utopize:
What would a technecracy look like?

Jonas:

What would it be?
A possibility
A rhetoric answer to the didactic –
What would hell look like?
A travel through the world of words,
Might not be worth the bet:

Forgotten corners
Of human abysses.

It is now my turn to share something with you:

This time is not different than any other,
Chaos shall be our only friend –
Time and words are no sea to be sailed on,
For near those places there are no grounds to be found.

Mistakingly, heading toward nowhere,
Techno means the same as any other word:
Techne suggests the dream of
Human’s manipulation,
The creation of means,
The enchaining and impairment of nature.

Techne, then, becoming an arm of nature –
The charlatan, conman, mindreader,
Attached to the same fear that drives the righteous one,
Brings forth an illusion,
And, similar to nature’s inexistent logic,
The technecrat steals,
Mis-reveals

From this abyss, I shall see no tree,
I temporize:
What could a technocracy look like?

Sybrand:

Surely, from the hellish wells of history,
From the depths of human chaos,
At least one meaningful bucket can be drawn,
To pour upon ourselves,
To awaken us from present drowsiness?
To quench our thirst for hope?

Techne – that hellenic understanding of technology,
Reinvigorates our relationship with Gaia:

Re-embedded in the natural,
Technological production
Mutates into technelogical creation:

Re-embedded in the natural,
Productivity re-evolves into an essential craftsmanship,

Re-embedded in the natural,
Power as coercion becomes
Power as potential:
Common statecraft replaces
Distant democratic delegation,

Desperately in need of reinterpretation,
Let’s unearth the roots of our technological foundation,
To give birth to an earthlier sense of future procreation.