themidnightenigma

Latest Posts by themidnightenigma

"But what is the use of the humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past?

The answer to the first question is: because we are interested in reality. Both the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call reality less important, than that of the active life?

The man who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine, as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought. Philosophical and psychological theories, historical doctrines and all sorts of speculations and discoveries, have changed, and keep changing, the lives of countless millions. Even he who merely transmits knowledge or learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more keenly aware than its friends. It is impossible to conceive of our world in termsof our world in terms of action alone. Only in God is there a "Coincidence of Act and Thought" as the scholastics put it. Our reality can only be understood as an interpenetration of these two."

Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts

And when it comes to the moment where you must decide to let one more breath past, it's these little touches of colour that flash past your eyes...

Cuckoo

They say cuckoos never raise their young,

I know you are the reason.

Your words are diligent henchmen embedding themselves in my skin and my brain . A deafening curse that numbs my limbs, you're fierce dark magic opening your hungry maw and swallowing my aspirations

The seeds of doubt vines you garland me with suffocates all my ambition until it’s nothing but a shuddering  flicker of a flame

Everything is collapsing

Memory after flashback after nightmare disintegrating

Only embers remain at this point

Growing colder with each passing moment, you gave birth to a dead girl

My childlike wonder rolls down my cheek landing on my stained hands

Because you gave birth to yet another mother who is designed to abandon her young,Cuckoo.

Because you birthed me a Bird

and barred me in a slowly capsizing, comfortable cage.

Because you made sure Home was something I would always run from

What did your parents think of you, Cuckoo, you changeling child with a head filled with proud ideas and

And magic dripping freely from charcoal stained fingers?

Did they fear you? Did they love you, Cuckoo As warblers love a cuckoo's kin, for killing their eggs

And faithfully feeding its hungry maw

or were you raised like you sculpted me?

i have polished this grief you have grown into my glutes and made wings of it.

you may tell me a thousand times over that I am worse than you will ever be for all my womb can hold is blood not brood,

i'll always tell you that i'd rather have a hollow womb than an empty nest.

And Remember Cuckoo, you may delude yourself as much as you like but the first truth you taught me was that the wicked they may be free,young forever great but they don't get to ever Rest.

i may be bird still yet my voice is not a Cuckoo's calling.

-swara

To my dearest Mother.

I hope death is kinder to you than life was.

This november has been the most cold month of my life and as always, my angst breeds miserable poetry💕

-Swara

Leaves//Lives

November's soft tragedy claims your lips and seals them shut with embroidery of all those you love.

November comes with a faltering grip, a fist, delicately clenching your barely beating heart, in November's well-worn hands, it begged to whither, to wriggle like a worm in the grasps of a beak.

November drags in the shivering sighs of autumn leaving skeletal trees with rumbling laughs and the lament of howling chimneys.

November hoards the names of your killed desires in its mouth and leaves a cold kiss carved on your beloved's clavicle for you to cover in the cardigans of knitted hope. 

November never leaves.

November never lives.

- Swara

Footnote: If you can tell something is seriously wrong with me, no you can't, it's November, nothing nice knows November.