Brent Kollock
All images by and courtesy of the artist.
What if reason was the only tool at our disposal to fall in love? What if logic was the dominant force in matters of longing and desire? The fatal flaws of logic and reason are in their nature to be malleable and bias reaffirming. Would we have tragedies of love? Would we have epics of love? Would we ever feel a love that is not our own? But then what if love was purely a function of instinct? Of desire? Of possession and surrender simultaneously? Of things which are the opposite of rational, the opposite of reasoned?
These poems presented here, and their descriptive photos are explorations that try to make sense of the most unknowable of things, love. Not just love, but love of something, nature?, which can never understand or care about such things. If love is an impulse, if love is an obsession, couldnāt we find ourselves in love something as vast and unknowable as another person, or even the sea itself? If the sea stands in for the lover, what are we left with? A psyche laid bare? A weakness quivering in the light of reason? A fear to die without love? A pessimism fighting with an idealism?
Throughout history there have been love stories that reason cannot justify, that only the experience of pain from love can make them relevant. From Romeo and Juliet to the Butterfly lovers to Ohatsu and Tokubei and to Paolo and Francesca, love is a theme that is not rational and when it hurts us the most is when we understand it not with our mind but with out heart. It always seemed to me that Dante was jealous of Paolo and Francesca. His own love for Beatrice is never satisfied, and while these lovers are condemned to eternity in hell, at least they have each other. Perhaps that is too idealistic, but nothing makes for absurd ideals more than the lack of what is desired, what is needed.
Kierkegaard once said that a poet is āAn unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.ā Love is the universal theme that can be both deeply anguished and heavenly exalting. Poetry is the language of pain. Reason allows us to live another day. Love dies in the head.
After so much not knowing, the dryness comes down to the edge of the sea.
The illusion of hope, swollen with so much time, is inconsolable in what it has found,
only the memory of those that dared are scattered on the hard and dusty ground.
The monsoon, like all yearning passing so much despair, takes everything that was free.
Salvation is a gift to the patient, both the quick and the dead,
a promise through desirous alchemy we gladly sell to ourselves.
Hope and reality crash here, where everything futile is filed on rocky shelves,
and in a small patch of shade dying today, my dreams of you bleed the darkest red.
There are hours early in the day when all things are scented blue,
here are the sea and all I love quietly rocking in a foreboding peace,
but as the day turns overtly yellow and all foolish notions decrease,
sitting among so many bones I begin to accept what today time must do.
Here is a place where cruel hot wind meets the salving cool water below.
Where dust colors a harsh sky, a mirage of mother of pearl and hope,
where the ideas of love and desire aspired to a different reality must cope,
and seduction, torturous folly, plays on promise and a tragic reality to know.
Where the two meet here is a frayed edge, ragged and lacking a logical remedy.
The earth, much older than ardor, is swept up giving life to the infinite unknown.
In this webbing haze, hypnotizing beauty, just beyond reach where ideals are thrown,
all is wagered on a possibility of joy without pain or tragic ending despite the enemy.
The courage to chance on something just too far away is a crazed and delusional state.
How does seduction work here with only dust and breezes and tattered edges?
All motion shocks the state of the soul who only desires calm, never aspiring to successes,
yet from the edge of the cliffs today, I leap to a promise, or lose a bet with fate.
The prophet of death has no friends or even disciples, he is rigid and unforgiving.
He speaks a truth we vaguely know from the promises made while we kneeled,
we can hide from it as much as we like, but as is his, so our fate is already sealed.
Even at home he is a stranger, his appearance belies he is an outsider of life living.
Iāve met this emissary of time on the way to see you, just by your side.
Life had already left him, alone, and in this ennui it was that life he so missed.
I wonder if he too had fallen in love with a fantasy that in realty can never exist?
Eyes weighed down by his now eternal sadness as the words he spoke in silence cried.
I learned death is never heroic or filled with dramatic replies to a genius checkmate.
It is solitary, it is empty, it is silence where for a moment we understand it entirely,
but when that moment passes along with us, we know nothing at all of its finality.
Edenās curse, from that tree of knowledge, knowing the truth the moment itās too late.
In undisciplined meandering while looking for you, there is a dream I dream nightly,
of a time meeting death along the way, dreamt so frequent it now seems a memory.
I come to learn in these times, it is death who is king of the world in all reality,
for it occupies more space to cause grief and leaves no prayer unanswered impolitely.
To find the paradise of other dreams, to kiss your taste and to see in you everything anew,
it seems the opposite of the visions haunting the darkness of lonely sleep,
a setting off with no destination or even a shore where every hope we keep.
To never return to what is known, the opposite of my desire, is a penance signed by you.
A commingling of time and eternity creates this chasm where faith is lost to die alone.
The idea of understanding times linear nature gives a flimsy faint reassurance,
but death, to even the most fervent believer, is a mystery, a heartfelt disturbance,
leaving visions of what cannot be known amid prophecies carved on a friends headstone.
Here at the end of the earth, I reach out and there is nothing to touch.
Beyond the flesh and blood of it all is only a desolate emptiness,
the scars I have passed along the way tell me it all ends in ugliness.
Beyond this point I fear it is only oblivion and a God we trusted too much.
I am unsure if it is a dream or a guided tour of my manias, a treacherous morass.
There are no words to read and nothing that reflects my image when I arrive,
you are too harsh and vile to even offer a reassurance of my being alive,
while a wind that blows forever is only understood in the anguished rustling of the grass
We are only for a moment alive and it is the act of living which has made me a pessimist.
We hope to find through something outside ourselves, outside of even reason,
a means to defeat the one holding all the cards of our destiny, a final desperate treason.
When we reach the end we are always only delivered the nothingness we were promised.
Ever closer to the end of the earth, the end of reason, I begin to hear the last birds song.
Those who owe everything to good fortune have made everything important illegal.
Do we accept so readily the reality, this end to come, because we sense nothing is real?
From here I understand more than ever, the day of love can never last a moment too long.
To see what lies beyond the next bend, around the corner, is it you and your saving grace
or just a more bleak and more barren place waiting in patience to devour my hope?
The rocks beneath my feet become sharper to cut even deeper on this desperate slope,
life here is the exception as the lessons carve harsh and painful lines on the corners of my face.
This world was made from indifference arising as philosophy, hearts stagnating waiting to die,
to dream here is to be cursed a thousand times, to leave the world with a thousand regrets.
My wandering searching is guided by a god as delusional as me, is he the one that forgets
in this coming night, that last birds song is to hang the stars on the eternally black sky?
In moments before dusk, full of long shadows and suspicious vision,
what I take as real is surely a trick that you and time have conspired through.
And once again it is not the instinct that fails, but I yet as what to do.
In search of you, what I believe is true, imagined peril only feeds a lack of inhibition.
On that liminal edge you wait for me, between cause and effect, a not so subtle pain,
fear is trivial, steeped in the anxiety of oblivion where nothing at all is as it seems.
Lying at my is feet nothing and everything, with you it can only be a world of extremes,
the monsters you bring with all their succoring, only serve the manic rituals to ordain.
Iām only left without the strength to use this jawbone never sure it was really an ass.
Samson in myth has more strength and cunning than me, just another absurd man.
There is no way to slay your emptiness suffocating me here, I havenāt any rational plan,
while on bloodied knees in prayers that want no words, I improvise my requiem mass.
I mistrust everything that I seem to see so clear, for even you are not as you seem.
Weāve made taboo all that we love and need, it is hope that reason always steals,
in moments of low light and understanding, these morals are as worthless as my ideals.
Your subtle monsters caress me and my fear, hopeful to devour me before I can scream.
Sowing disappointment is the only way to find where Iāve been before.
I have loved but never understood, seeking solace while offering only despair,
if instincts tell me that I love you, why should I understand or even care?
Understanding is just another dream in disguise rattling my nearly empty core.
My feet have grown so old and tired and broken following you to here.
I dreamt of something the world could offer beyond what I could know.
I see now it is all just death and chaos and violence that you must bestow,
the birds songs are no longer beautiful, but painful psalms sung in anxious fear.
Before we created the gods to organize it all, you were always, already here.
Chaos is everywhere I have been, even in my thoughts there is only order under force.
All that is not to be understood, all the mayhem in nature without a logical recourse
dies in a mans dreams of order proving he is master of his empire, built of fear.
Tiny details unnoticed and inconceivable to perceive, decide everything thatās ever been.
A shift of sand yesterday is a new path I follow today along my never ending way.
Years ago a seed fell here and in difficulty grew a cage tempting me so close to stay,
in time not yet understood, you offered me a view of paradise, just not from within.
I have always walked slowly so as to never arrive, at least not while alive,
for arriving is the end, the death of looking for the only answer that really matters.
Slowly I met many people and conjured many answers, mostly overdue cadavers.
Itās all lies and magic tricks, here within sight of heaven, nothing believed can survive.
Beneath all your complexities, I found a hollow of loneliness and a scattered pile of bones.
Between every story and every lost pain, who among them was a slave and who a king?
All we are is memory, the chimerical grandiose museum outwardly projecting,
shifting shapes and stacks of broken mirrors looted from other peoples homes.
In surveying this balancing act of life, I wonder if the living have any appreciation at all?
Like thieves we have shared out this amazing treasure that is the day and the night,
yet we drown in boredom knowing everything has already been experienced in another light.
This despair renders us as ghosts, this promise of everything tomorrow is a tragedy to befall.
Time and its consequences are reduced to being measured in two ways of reality,
the moments race or the moments drag, when I am with you or without you.
The absurdity of what with difficulty Iām asked to believe and what I actually do,
imagining someone elseās dreams, the cause and effect of lifeās gnawing uncertainty.
Brent Kollock is a photojournalist/documentarian, author, artist and independent publisher living and working in the western Mexico. His recent work, āSea Glass and Mermaid Bonesā is a book of poetry and pictures taken with a toy camera and his upcoming book on the charreria featuring photographs and interviews with the ācowboysā of Mexico will be available by the end of this year.