Eternal truths, not you, attention, tears, surrender, a fallen soldier, the flame, and the future

***

Give yourself away, or remain, what difference could it make? There are no eternal truths, only today's untruths.

When you look- it is not your vision, when you weep it is not your tears, when you sing it is not your song, and when you die you will not be dead.

And so I attended; I neither pretended, intended, nor contended; I did not tend. Which is to say- I paid attention.

To be sure, at the final outpouring of my weary tears, I was not even there to shed them. For there is nothing of one's life that might be surrendered except the prideful assumption that there is something which one possesses, or which one is, that could be surrendered.

Like a soldier fallen on his own sword in the charge to battle- dying alone, Eye keep living.

You don't actually have to touch down to light the flame of another, in fact it's better for you if you don't. Just glide above the ready wicks, and the whole damned place shall burn.

For we are the future ...before it occurs in others; it is our duty to know the world, and to unknow the world, differently than it has so far been known and unknown.

***

These selected fragments are excerpted from unpublished writings by Jack Haas; selections from the notebooks 1990-2005.