Vicari, Justin

Reflections

Justin Vicari

Wherever man has love for god, this love is by nature unrequited. Thus, the symbols which characterize this love take on the fevered and unstable intensity with which an abandoned lover will sometimes take out old gifts and trinkets from the bottom of a drawer and fondle and kiss them—not only to seek succor from them, but to view them, whenever they enter his or her mind, as a kind of superstitious sign that the beloved is near and may even be coming back.

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He spoke with his eyes—an expression familiar to us all, yet which is only possible when the interlocutor is using his own eyes to hear.

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Cloud does not choose to be cloud; flower does not choose to be flower, nor bird choose to be bird, nor rock choose to be rock. Only man is given the choice to be cloud or flower, bird or rock.

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Those who have never felt a sense of heaven on earth would be unlikely to recognize it if they encountered it in the afterlife, if indeed it did exist.

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If people gossiped as loudly as the birds sing on summer days, our slander would perhaps transcend immoral whispered cowardice and become something brave and inquisitive. After all, this may in fact be exactly what the birds themselves are doing.

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Whenever someone performs some good act on our behalf, our vanity usually precludes that we view this as anything other than merely fair treatment—what is only our due. Therefore, only evil could be said to truly exist at all, at least as something in and of itself.

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Nothing is more evil than the concerted and energetic application of the powers of reason to defend what is irrational, for everything else that is bad stems precisely from this.

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Nothing is valid unless it creates its own necessary space. One must confess one’s desire to the beloved before it can be understood and returned, though in the expression it becomes so much less—a blackmail threat, perhaps, or an unverifiable promise.

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Perhaps if love itself were made categorically illegal it would be practiced with more sublime force. The way things stand, love’s true grace—that it really is a crime against all, against the universe, albeit an unofficial one—goes unnoticed, though rarely unpunished.

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The poet sculpts his dreamy, airy reverie in stone, and in so doing, makes his sedentary despair and boredom move.