Out in the blue hush,
the world folds into itself—
silver static, breathing,
a million tiny mirrors
in a fevered dream,
a mandala made of panic.
Something rises,
something falls,
and from far away
it looks almost gentle—
like every bruise
is just light
when seen from the wrong angle.
The dolphins come,
sharp thoughts slicing the quiet—
and the pattern trembles,
reforms,
pretends nothing happened.
A whale opens its cathedral mouth,
lifting the darkness
full of stained-glassed fractures,
whole galaxies slipping
inside a quiet apocalypse,
a holy stillness
that feels like forgiveness
when you zoom out
far enough in time.
Above it all,
the luminous sky watches,
from a different kind of darkness
where the sun never sets.
From that height,
even terror feels choreographed—
a kind of beauty
wearing its teeth.
And I’m down here,
a small flicker in the swarm,
a tiny spark inside the fractal,
trying to understand
why every broken thing
still shines a little
as it falls—
down,
down,
down
into the bruise-colored silence below.
The darkness below calls me
by a name I can’t remember,
which is to say
that I forgot.
The ocean feels
like the only thing that knows
how to cradle a soul
so heavy with gravity—
the only thing patient enough
to hold my weight
as I sink lower.
Sometimes it feels
like there is grace in the ruin,
that hurt has a symmetry to it,
that the collapse is somehow
necessary,
luminous,
almost kind.
I keep hearing echoes
of a sentence I can’t quite place:
something about the world being soft,
or the pain not sinking
all the way in,
or how even the worst moments
still glow at the edges
if you descend far enough,
and tilt your head
just right
at midnight.
And the sea keeps calling—
gently pulling me lower,
with its hand
as I float,
singing in a mechanical hum,
lullabies from the deep,
wrapping me in its pressure,
as if to show me
where the light goes
when it finally
gives up on the sky.
People say the ruin has
its own symmetry,
every creature devours another,
nothing goes to waste,
every wound becomes a circle,
and from the right vantage,
it all looks like a blessing
no one remembers asking for.
And in the quiet
after the quiet,
the phrase finally returns—
whole this time,
unmasked by the cold tide,
like a shell
I once lost.
— Voltaire
https://voltaire.press/charles-voltaire/everything-is-beautiful/
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I thought poetry was dead. I thought Gertrude Stein and her pals had killed it, back when the Platonists were busy killing all the arts—concert music, painting, sculpture, architecture, fiction, dance. I spent years searching the “Year’s Best” collections, /Poetry/ magazine, the little obscure literary journals, and found nothing. And here I find it still alive on substack.
This is part of a much larger pattern. Sometime between 1930 and 2000, the pyramid turned upside-down, one art at a time. The cream began sinking while the shit floated to the top, in everything. The best journalism is on YouTube and substack; the best science journalism is on free blogs. Carnegie Hall performs only the very worst composers from this century; the best work for Hollywood. The last great scientist was slandered for the last 50 years of his life, and again by Scientific American when he died; the only scientist most Americans can name is Neil deGrasse Tyson. The best SF story of the past decade was retracted due to a firestorm of hatred; the most-vile and hateful one was rewarded by a $600,000 MacArthur genius grant. Our tech “visionaries” worship Steve Jobs‘ ghost and scorn Elon Musk. The best colleges are the worst; the best poetry is hiding in pop music. No one reads the stories in The New Yorker anymore; the best fiction will be on the substack of someone with 4 subscribers, or My Little Pony fan-fiction.
Everything that’s still alive is in hiding.
Competence is universally suppressed. I was fired from my last job for working too fast. It took me 4 days this week to contact my health insurance company, trying to get a prescription refilled without which I will die, because their phone tree software doesn’t work. I have a deadly disease, easily fixed with a safe and common operation; but I’ve spent years failing to find a surgeon willing to do the surgery because a famous doctor at Cleveland Clinic has been spreading misinformation about it, flat-out contradicting the entire medical literature in favor of her “lived experience”. Just this week, a revolution in Iran was bloodily suppressed, and neither the news media nor the President has heard about it yet.
I thought poetry was dead. I thought Gertrude Stein and her pals had killed it, back when the Platonists were busy killing all the arts—concert music, painting, sculpture, architecture, fiction, dance. I spent years searching the “Year’s Best” collections, /Poetry/ magazine, the little obscure literary journals, and found nothing. And here I find it still alive on substack.
This is part of a much larger pattern. Sometime between 1930 and 2000, the pyramid turned upside-down, one art at a time. The cream began sinking while the shit floated to the top, in everything. The best journalism is on YouTube and substack; the best science journalism is on free blogs. Carnegie Hall performs only the very worst composers from this century; the best work for Hollywood. The last great scientist was slandered for the last 50 years of his life, and again by Scientific American when he died; the only scientist most Americans can name is Neil deGrasse Tyson. The best SF story of the past decade was retracted due to a firestorm of hatred; the most-vile and hateful one was rewarded by a $600,000 MacArthur genius grant. Our tech “visionaries” worship Steve Jobs‘ ghost and scorn Elon Musk. The best colleges are the worst; the best poetry is hiding in pop music. No one reads the stories in The New Yorker anymore; the best fiction will be on the substack of someone with 4 subscribers, or My Little Pony fan-fiction.
Everything that’s still alive is in hiding.
Competence is universally suppressed. I was fired from my last job for working too fast. It took me 4 days this week to contact my health insurance company, trying to get a prescription refilled without which I will die, because their phone tree software doesn’t work. I have a deadly disease, easily fixed with a safe and common operation; but I’ve spent years failing to find a surgeon willing to do the surgery because a famous doctor at Cleveland Clinic has been spreading misinformation about it, flat-out contradicting the entire medical literature in favor of her “lived experience”. Just this week, a revolution in Iran was bloodily suppressed, and neither the news media nor the President has heard about it yet.
It’s a Feast of Fools that never ends.