Know Thyself

It is strange, but we are alive. Considering all the first and last reasons which create, conserve, and destroy the cosmos, we can only know the least. We awaken to a pre-conceived perception of ourself without having been consulted about life at all. Our eyes are blind to the circumstances which manufacture an ever revealing world, our ears are too tiny to hear the songs of vast Gods. And yet we exist. We are, we act, and we speak. We are present, and yet we don’t know what this presence might mean: to be.

What is left is an almost mystic notion, a silent closeness, a sound, a fluke, the dark warmth of blood rushed lips. We either engage in what Heidegger called the Chatter, or we verse. The aim of poetry is to confront the mystery, to name the unnameable, and to draw an allegory where we are wordlessly being spoken to. That precise artifice is the likewise holy and scary element residing in the chest of a human being, it’s here where we encounter our only freedom, a moment which widens us and all our worlds into an everlasting present: By lightening up our futile path, a path we have no choice but to walk, we place ourselves for a short while in the very centre of the world.

Alongside our poetic endeavor, it’s mainly the training of martial arts which teaches us our imperfections. It humbles us blinded seekers who are constantly roaming but nowhere arrive. When the Neurobiologist Sam Harris wrote an essay about his experience with Jiu-Jitsu, he named his paper “The Pleasures of Drowning.” Four words with which all poetic endeavor could be summarized as well. Among other things, Harris diagnoses a bad awakening as soon as we are confronted with somebody who is a versatile Jiu Jitsu player. The ignorant and uninformed will come face to face with an undeniable truth, shattering everything we dared to think about ourselves. A physical fight is free of illusions. Only facts remain. A fight is a soul crusher because it unveils every wrong notion we held about ourselves. It shows us as we truly are. Harris writes: “Training in BJJ (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) offers a powerful lens through which to examine some primary human concerns, truth versus delusion, self-knowledge, ethics and overcoming fear.” Truth and delusion. Perhaps a long human life is only lived to be able to separate the one from the other and to speak, to act and to fight where most is learned about our inevitable life.