"Hold this to
be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard
over the solitude of the other. All companionship can consist only in the
strengthening of two neighboring solitudes, whereas everything that one is wont
to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person
abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give
themselves up in order to come close to each other, there is no longer any
ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling. …
Love your
solitude, and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. …
To walk inside
of yourself and meet no one for hours -- that is what you must be able to
attain."
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Ode to a Lone Odist
Heroic solo poet,
Bold loner of prose,
Owned by no one.
Rowing a boat alone
In the blowing cyclone,
Knowing no port,
No hold,
No home.
No holy oath,
No whole from both.
No love.
Enclosed in a stove.
Cogito ergo sum ego.
What toll do we owe the odist
For oracular notions told?
Poems and tomes of soul probing,
Groping in a hole too cold for most.
A comatose ghost woken,
Then rolled to the old boneyard,
Closed
For us, open only as a footnote.
For those who wrote it, an open sore,
A molten core.
But that onliest core is gold
Those poets protect, promote so.
Alone flows the source,
The origin of the gorgeous.
Oh. No?
Associations, no association;
Approaches, no approaching;
Accords, according to no one;
Chords, no chorus.
Compose without decomposing.
Go from the shadow of the bodhi,
Loan your ego to the cosmos,
The glow shown within shone without.
No soul is an atoll.
