The West: a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse

 Without the notion of a failed universe, the spectacle of injustice in every system would put even an abulic into a straitjacket.

Annihilating affords a sense of power, flatters something obscure, something original in us. It is not by erecting but by pulverizing that we may divine the secret satisfactions of a god. Whence the lure of destruction and the illusions it provokes among the frenzied of any era.

Each generation lives in the absolute: it behaves as if it had reached the apex if not the end of history.

Any and every nation, at a certain moment of its career, considers itself chosen. It is at this moment that it gives the best and the worst of itself.

No accident that the Trappist order was founded in France rather than in Italy or Spain. Granted the Spanish and the Italians talk ceaselessly, but they do not hear themselves talk, whereas the Frenchman relishes his eloquence, never forgets he is talking, is consummately conscious of the fact He alone could regard silence as an ordeal, as an askesis.What spoils the French Revolution for me is that it all happens on stage, that its promoters are born actors, that the guillotine is merely a decor. The history of France, as a whole, seems a bespoke history, an acted history: everything in it is perfect from the theatrical point of view. It is a performance, a series of gestures and events which are watched rather than suffered, a spectacle that takes ten centuries to put on. Whence the impression of frivolity which even the Terror affords, seen from a distance.

Prosperous societies are far more fragile than the others, since it remains for them to achieve only their own ruin, comfort not being an ideal when we possess it, still less of one when it has been around for generations. Not to mention the fact that nature has not included well-being in her calculations and could not do so without perishing herself.

If all peoples turned apathetic at once, there would be no more conflicts, no more wars, no more empires. But unfortunately there are young peoples, and indeed young people—a major obstacle to the philanthropists’ dreams: to bring it about that all men might reach the same degree of lassitude or ineffectual-Ity….

We must side with the oppressed on every occasion, even when they are in the wrong, though without losing sight of the fact that they are molded of the same clay as their oppressors.

Characteristic of dying regimes: to permit a confused mixture of beliefs and doctrines, and to give the Illusion, at the same time, that the moment of choice can be indefinitely postponed …

This is the source—the sole source—of the charm of pre-revolutionary periods.

Only false values prevail, because everyone can assimilate them, counterfeit them (false thereby to the second degree). An idea that succeeds is necessarily a pseudo-idea.

Revolutions are the sublime of bad literature.

The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.

The right to suppress everyone that bothers us should rank first in the constitution of the ideal State.

The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.

According to the Princess Palatine, Mme de Maintenon was in the habit of repeating, during the years after the king’s death when she had no further role to play: “For some time now, there has prevailed a spirit of vertigo which is spreading everywhere.’ This “spirit of vertigo” is what the losers have always noticed, correctly moreover, and we might well reconsider all history from the perspective of this formula.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

The surfeited hate themselves—not secretly but publicly, and long to be swept away, one way or another. They prefer, in any case, that the sweeping be accomplished with their own cooperation. This is the most curious, the most original aspect of a revolutionary situation.

A nation generates only one revolution. The Germans have never repeated the exploit of the Reformation, or rather, they have repeated but not equaled it. France has remained an eternal tributary of ‘89. Equally true of Russia and of all nations, this tendency to plagiarize oneself in regard to revolutions is at once reassuring and distressing.

Romans of the decadence enjoyed only what they called Greek leisure (otium graecum), the thing they had most despised in the period of their vigor. The analogy with today’s civilizations is so flagrant it would be indecent to insist on it.

Alaric claimed that a “demon” drove him against Rome. Every exhausted civilization awaits its barbarian, and every barbarian awaits his demon.

The West: a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse.

All these nations were great because they had great prejudices. They now have none. Are they nations still? At most, disintegrated crowds.

The white race increasingly deserves the name given by the American Indians: palefaces.In Europe, happiness stops at Vienna. Beyond, misery upon misery, since the beginning.

The Romans, the Turks, and the British could found lasting empires because, refractory to all doctrine, they imposed none upon the subject nations. They would never have managed to wield so long a hegemony had they been afflicted with some messianic vice Unhoped-for oppressors, administrators, and parasites, lords without convictions, they had the art of combining authority and indifference, rigor and abandon. It is this art, the secret of the true master, which the Spaniards of old lacked, as it is lacking in the conquerors of our own day.

So long as a nation keeps the awareness of its superiority, it is fierce and respected; once it loses that awareness, a nation becomes humanized, and no longer counts.

When I rage against the age, I can calm myself merely by thinking of what will happen, of the retrospective jealousy of those who come after us, in certain respects, we belong to the old humanity, the humanity that could still regret paradise. But those who come after us will not even have the recourse of that regret, they will not even have an idea of it, not even the word!

My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.

When we think of the Berlin salons in the Romantic period, of the role played in them by a Henrietta Herz or a Rachel Levin, of the friendship between the latter and Crown Prince Louis-Ferdinand; and when we then think that if such women had lived in this century they would have died in some gas chamber, we cannot help considering the belief in progress as the falsest and stupidest of superstitions.

Hesiod was the first to elaborate a philosophy of history. And also launched the notion of decadence. By doing so, what a light he casts on historical process! If, at the very outset, in the heart of the post-Homeric world, he decided that humanity was In its Iron age, what would he have said a few centuries later—what would he say today?

Except in periods clouded over by frivolity or Utopia, man has always believed himself on the threshold of the worst. Knowing what he knew, by what miracle could he have unceasingly varied his desires and his terrors?

When, just after the First World War, electricity was installed in the village where I was born, there was a general murmur of protest, then mute desolation. But when electricity was installed in the churches (there were three), everyone was convinced the Antichrist had come and, with him, the end of time.

These Carpathian peasants had seen clearly, had seen far: Emerging from prehistory, they knew already, in that day and age, what “civilized” men have known only recently.

It is my prejudice against everything that turns out well that has given me a taste for reading history.

Ideas are unsuited to a final agony; they die, of course, but without knowing how to die, whereas an event exists only with a view to its end. A sufficient reason to prefer the company of historians to that of philosophers.

During his famous embassy to Rome in the second century b.c., Carneades took advantage of the occasion to speak the first day in favor of the idea of justice, and on the following day against it. From that moment, philosophy, hitherto nonexistent in that country of healthy conduct, began to perpetrate its ravages. What is philosophy, then? The worm in the fruit….

Cato the Censor, who had been present at the Greek’s dialectical performances, was alarmed by them and asked the Senate to satisfy the Athenian delegation as soon as possible, so harmful and even dangerous did he consider their presence. Roman youth was not to frequent minds so destructive.

On the moral level, Carneades and his companions were as formidable as the Carthaginians on the military. Rising nations fear above all the absence of prejudices and prohibitions, the intellectual shamelessness which constitutes the allure of declining civilizations.

Hercules was punished for having succeeded in all his undertakings. Similarly Troy, too happy, had to perish.

Pondering this vision shared by the tragic poets, we cannot help thinking that the so-called free world, upon which every fortune has been lavished, will inevitably suffer Ilion’s fate, for the jealousy of the gods survives their disappearance.

“The French don’t want to work any more, they all want to write, my concierge told me, unaware that she was then and there passing judgment on all old civilizations.

A society is doomed when it no longer has the force to be limited. How, with an open mind—too open—can it protect itself against the excesses, the mortal risks of freedom?

Ideological disputes reach the point of paroxysm only in countries where men have fought each other over words, where they have gone to death for words …, in the countries, in short, which have known wars of religion.

A nation which has exhausted its mission is like an author who repeats himself—no, who has nothing left to say. For to repeat yourself is to prove that you still believe in yourself, and in what you have said. But a declining nation no longer has even the strength to mouth its old mottoes, which once had assured it its preeminence and its pride.

French has become a provincial language. The natives don’t mind. Only the foreigner is inconsolable on its account—he alone goes into mourning for Nuance….

Themistocles, by a unanimously approved decree, had the interpreter of Xerxes’ ambassadors put to death “for having dared use the Greek language to express the orders of a barbarian.”

A people commits such an act only at the peak of its career. It is decadent, it is dying, when it no longer believes in its language, when it stops believing that its language is the supreme form of expression, the language.

A nineteenth-century philosopher maintained, In his innocence, that la Rochefoucauld was right for the past, but that he would be invalidated by the fixture. The Idea of progress dishonors the intellect.

The further man proceeds, the less he is in a position to solve his problems, and when, at the apex of his blindness, he will be convinced he is on the point of success, then the unheard-of will occur.

I would bestir myself, at best, for the Apocalypse, but for a revolution … To collaborate with an ending or a genesis, an ultimate or initial calamity, yes, but not with a change for some better or worse….

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

In the long run, tolerance breeds more ills than intolerance. If this is true, it constitutes the most serious accusation that can be made against man.

Once the animals no longer need to fear each other, they fall into a daze and take on that dumbfounded look they have in zoos. Individuals and’ nations would afford the same spectacle if some day they managed to live in harmony, no longer trembling openly or in secret.

With sufficient perspective, nothing is good or bad. The historian who ventures to judge the past is writing journalism in another century.

In two hundred years (let us be precise!), the survivors of the overly fortunate nations will be put on reservations and visited, contemplated with disgust, commiseration, or stupor, and with a malicious admiration as well.

Monkeys living in groups reject, apparently, those which in some fashion have consorted with humans. How one regrets that Swift never knew such a detail!

Are we to execrate our age—or all ages?

Do we think of Buddha withdrawing from the world on account of his contemporaries?

If humanity has such love for saviors, those fanatics who so shamelessly believe in themselves, it is because humanity supposes they believe in it.

The strength of this Statesman is to be visionary and cynical. A dreamer without scruples.The worst crimes are committed out of enthusiasm, a morbid state responsible for almost all public and private disasters.

The future appeals to you? All yours! Myself I prefer to keep to the incredible present and the incredible past. I leave it to you to face the Incredible itself.

“You’re against everything that’s been done since the last war,” said the very up-to-date lady.

“You’ve got the wrong date: I’m against everything that’s been done since Adam.”

Hitler is without a doubt the most sinister character in history. And the most pathetic. He managed to achieve precisely the opposite of what he wanted, he destroyed his ideal point by point. It is for this reason that he is a monster in a class by himself—that is, a monster twice over, for even his pathos is monstrous.

All great events have been set in motion by madmen, by mediocre madmen. Which will be true, we may be sure, of the “end of the world” itself.

The Zohar teaches that those who do evil on earth were no better in heaven, that they were impatient to leave it, and, rushing to the mouth of the abyss, that they “arrived ahead of the time when they were to descend into this world.”

One readily discerns the profundity of this vision of the pre-existence of souls, and its usefulness when we are to explain the assurance and the triumph of the “wicked,” their solidity and their competence. Having prepared their endeavors so far ahead, it is not astonishing that they should possess the earth: they conquered it before they were here …, an eternity ago, and for all eternity, as a matter of fact.

What distinguishes the true prophet from the rest is that he stands at the origin of movements and doctrines which exclude and oppose each other.

In a metropolis as in a hamlet, what we still love best is to watch the fall of one of our kind.

The appetite for destruction is so deeply anchored within us that no one manages to extirpate it. It belongs to our constitution, for the very basis of our being is demoniac.

The sage is a pacified, withdrawn destroyer. The others are destroyers in practice.

Misfortune is a passive, endured state, while malediction supposes an election à rebours, consequently a notion of mission, of inner power, which is not implied in misfortune. An accursed individual or nation necessarily outclasses an unfortunate individual or nation.

Strictly speaking, history docs not repeat itself, but since the illusions man is capable of are limited in number, they always return in another disguise, thereby giving some ultradecrepit filth a look of novelty and a tragic glaze.

I read some pages on Jovinian, Saint Basil, and several others. The conflict, during the first centuries of Christianity, between orthodoxy and heresy seems no more insane than the one to which modern ideologies have accustomed us. The modalities of the controversy, the passions at work, the follies and the absurdities, are almost identical. In both cases, everything turns on the unreal and the unverifiable, which form the very basis of either religious or political dogmas. History would be tolerable only if we escaped both kinds. True, it would then cease altogether, for the great good of everyone—those who endure it as well as those who make it.

What makes destruction suspect is its facility: anyone who comes along can excel in it. But if to destroy is easy, to destroy oneself is less so. Superiority of the outcast over the agitator or the anarchist.

Had I lived in the early period of Christianity, I too, I fear, would have yielded to its seduction. And I hate that sympathizer, that hypothetical fanatic: I cannot forgive myself that conversion of two thousand years ago….

Tom between violence and disillusionment, I seem to myself a terrorist who, going out in the street to perpetrate some outrage, stops on the way to consult Ecclesiastes or Epictetus.

According to Hegel, man will be completely free only “by surrounding himself with a world entirely created by himself.”

But this is precisely what he has done, and man has never been so enchained, so much a slave as now.

Life would become endurable only among a humanity which would no longer have any illusions in reserve, a humanity completely disabused and delighted to be so.

Everything I have been able to feel and to think coincides with an exercise in anti-utopia.

Man will not last. Ambushed by exhaustion, he will have to pay for his too-original career. For it would be inconceivable and contra naturam that he drag on much longer and come to a good end. This prospect is depressing, hence likely.

“Enlightened despotism”: the only regime that can attract a disabused mind, one incapable of being the accomplice of revolutions since it is not even the accomplice of history.

Nothing more painful than two contemporary prophets. One must withdraw, must disappear if he is unwilling to expose himself to ridicule. Unless both are thus exposed, which would be the most equitable solution.

I am stirred, even overwhelmed each time I happen upon an innocent person. Where does he come from? What is he after? Doesn’t such an apparition herald some disaster? It is a very special disturbance we suffer in the presence of someone there is no way of calling our kind.

Wherever civilized men appeared for the first time, they were regarded by the natives as devils, as ghosts, specters. Never as living men! Unequaled intuition, a prophetic insight, if ever there was one.

If everyone had seen through everything, if everyone had “understood,” history would have ceased long since. But we are fundamentally, biologically unsuited to “understand.” And even if everyone understood except for one, history would be perpetuated because of that one, because of his blindness. Because of a single illusion!

X maintains we are at the end of a “cosmic cycle” and that soon everything will fall apart. And he does not doubt this for one moment.

At the same time, he is the father of a—numerous—family. With certitudes like his, what aberration has deluded him into bringing into a doomed world one child after the next? If we foresee the End, if we are sure it will be coming soon, if we even anticipate it, better to do so alone. One does not procreate on Patmos.

Montaigne, a sage, has had no posterity. Rousseau, an hysteric, still stirs nations. I like only the thinkers who have inspired no tribune of the people.

In 1441, the Council of Florence decreed that pagans, Jews, heretics, and schismatics will have no part in “eternal life” and that all, unless they embrace, before dying, the true religion, will go straight to hell.

In the days when the Church professed such enormities it was truly the Church. An institution is vital and strong only if it rejects everything which is not itself. Unfortunately the same is true of a nation or of a regime.

A serious, honest mind understands—and can understand—nothing of history. History in return is marvelously suited to delight an erudite cynic.

Extraordinary pleasure at the thought that, being human, one is born under an accursed star, and that whatever one has undertaken and whatever one is going to undertake will be fondled by mischance.

Plotinus befriended a Roman senator who had freed his slaves, renounced his wealth, and who ate and slept at the houses of friends, for he no longer owned anything. This senator, from the “official” point of view, was deranged, and his case would be regarded as distressing, which indeed it was: a saint in the Senate…. His presence, even his possibility—what an omen! The hordes were not far….

A man who has completely vanquished selfishness, who retains no trace of it whatever, cannot live longer than twenty-one days, according to one modern Vedantist school. No Western moralist, not even the grimmest, would have dared venture an observation on human nature so startling, so revealing.

We invoke “progress” less and less and “mutation” more and more, and all that we allege to illustrate the latter’s advantages is merely one symptom after another of an unrivaled catastrophe.

We can breathe—and brawl—only in a corrupt regime. But we realize as much only after having contributed to its destruction, and when nothing is left but our capacity to regret it.

What we call the creative instinct is merely a deviation, merely a perversion of our nature: we have not been brought into the world in order to innovate, to revolutionize, but to enjoy our semblance of being, in order to liquidate it quietly and to vanish afterward without a fuss.

The Aztecs were right to believe the gods must be appeased, to offer them human blood every day in order to keep the universe from sinking back into chaos.

We long since ceased to believe in the gods, and we no longer offer them sacrifices. Yet the world is still here. No doubt. Only we no longer have the good luck to know why it does not collapse on the spot.

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born 

The race taking place now will decide whether Whites will become a minority before they become racially conscious...

"[In this video Mark Collett, leader of the pro-White British nationalist movement, Patriotic Alternative, gives an impassioned speech at PA’s annual conference about the challenges and dangers ahead for nationalists in a regime that is increasingly open about its White replacement agenda.

The following points were made by Mark:

Opening remarks thanking attendees.

Analogy of boiling a frog to describe gradual societal changes.
“Since 1945, there have been sweeping changes to almost every aspect of British life.”

Recent rapid changes under new Labour government.
“The heat has been turned up so quickly that nearly everyone is talking about it now.”

Public perception shift on immigration issues (8:00)
“There was once a time when you could speak to members of the public and they didn’t believe mass immigration was even an issue.”

Recent events highlighting immigration concerns (10:00)
“Who would have thought back in June that less than four months later we would have seen the murder of three little White girls by the son of migrants?”

New government policies and crackdowns (12:00)
“New legislation is now being drafted to criminalize those who speak out against migration.”

Two-tier system disadvantaging white British citizens (15:00)
“Normal White working folk are now clearly second class citizens.”

Mainstream acknowledgment of two-tier policing (18:00)
“The term has been used in Parliament, in the media and in almost every major newspaper.”

Opportunities and dangers of current situation (20:00)
“This is a watershed moment for nationalists here in the UK and it represents not some small or incremental shift, but a massive jump.”

Government’s acceleration of immigration (23:00)
“The establishment have clearly acknowledged that there is a race going on between migration and the public consciousness of migration.”

Recent population statistics (26:00)
“For the first time since 1976, deaths outstripped births here in the UK.”

Government’s efforts to silence dissent (28:00)
“Their second course of action is to effectively terrorize white people”

Origins of the term “terrorism” (30:00)
“The words terrorism and terrorist came into existence thanks to a gruesome and protracted period of state sponsored violence during the French revolution.”

Current state surveillance and oppression (33:00)
“We are moving toward a point where holding the wrong opinions will be seen as almost a capital crime”

Changing attitudes towards remigration (35:00)
“Remigration is now rightly seen as the only solution that can save us from becoming a minority.”

Potential criminalization of remigration rhetoric (37:00)
“Calls for remigration and deportation could well be outlawed as terms that are likely to stir up racial hatred.”

Plans for indigenous rights advocacy (39:00)
“We will become an indigenous rights advocacy and pressure group.”

Expectation of some supporters leaving the movement (41:00)
“I expect that some people who were once very active in this movement will take their leave.”

Speaker’s commitment despite risks (42:00)
“I will carry on despite the associated risks, because I believe more than anything that what we do is right.”

Closing rallying cry
“Those who dare to fight in the darkest of times are the heroes that will ensure that tomorrow belongs to us.”

– KATANA]"

Firstly, before I start speaking, I just want to say a huge thank you to everyone who came here today. To see us packing out a room like this for what, the fifth year in a row is incredible! The momentum we’ve built and the momentum we’ve maintained over the last five years, people often credit to me. But it’s not really me who did this, it’s us!

So when people are giving myself a round of applause, I do appreciate that. But the round of applause should be extended to everyone who is part of our community, because first and foremost, that is what Patriotic Alternative is all about.

Now, there is an overused analogy that I am sure everyone in this room will be familiar with. And that analogy is about boiling a frog.

But in case you are the one person in the room that hasn’t heard of this analogy before, it’s based around the idea that if you were going to boil a frog, which I don’t recommend, by the way, but if you were, and you were going to boil that frog alive in a pan of water, you’re better off putting the frog in cold water, placing the pan on the stove and gently turning up the heat so the frog doesn’t know that it’s being boiled alive, until it’s too late. The converse of this is, of course, you just throw the frog into a pan of bubbling water on the stove and it jumps right out and it escapes!

Now, obviously, everyone in this room today can understand why this analogy has been used so often, as it clearly applies directly to the struggle that we are in. Since 1945, there have been sweeping changes to almost every aspect of British life. And if you took a snapshot of Britain in, let’s say, 1950, and compared it to the Britain that we live in today, I think we’d all agree [sound cut out] … Fresh water from a stream with bubbling hot water sat in a pan on a stove. And we didn’t go from 1945 to 2024 in a heartbeat or even in a short period of time. It took us over three quarters of a century. That’s longer than the average lifespan of the people who were alive when all of those changes were set in motion. The changes were drip fed to the public.

And in terms of the analogy that I began with, the analogy of the frog in the pan, the heat was turned up so very slowly over such a lengthy period of time. But here today in Britain in 2024, I finally think that the overused analogy of the frog being boiled is starting to lose its relevance. As since the election of Keir Starmer and the current Labour government, the heat has been turned up so quickly that I think it would be impossible for anyone not to notice! In fact, the heat has been turned up so quickly that nearly everyone is talking about it now.

Now, as people have said, I’ve been around for a long time and it was once common for nationalists like myself who engaged with the public to be turned away or dismissed on the grounds that we were talking nonsense! I’ve spent over two decades trying to convince the public of both the reality and the gravity of the situation that we as a race and nation face. I have first hand knowledge of the way the public dismissed us.

Believe it or not, there was once a time when you could speak to members of the public and they didn’t believe mass immigration was even an issue. And they certainly would not have entertained the idea that White Britons would ever have faced the prospect of being a minority in their ancestral homeland.

What’s more, if you tried to inform people that as this process would take place, not only would White Britons be the ones to pay financially for the transition, but during that transition they would become an underclass, many people used to roll their eyes. They would even laugh and mock you for what you were saying.

To many, the future that we warned of was simply preposterous! It was a fantasy! Or worse still, it was a conspiracy theory! And I’ve had that argument thrown into my face more times than I care to remember.

But over the last three and a half months, things have changed dramatically. There has been a massive, a seismic political shift in Britain. A shift that has been overseen and stage managed by what is undoubtedly the most nakedly anti-White and pro-migrant government this country has ever seen! One that puts both the Blair and Sunak regimes to shame. This shift is the equivalent of turning up the heat under the pan, not by several degrees, but by such a factor that the frog immediately takes note.

Who would have thought back in June that less than four months later we would have seen the murder of three little White girls by the son of migrants? Spontaneous mass anti-migrant protests on the streets of cities the length and breadth of the country. A brutal police clampdown like nothing we have ever witnessed before. 24 hour politicised courts being convened to deal with speech and thought criminals! The Prime Minister going on television to tell us he is forming special police forces to simply focus on Internet hate crimes. New legislation is now being draughted to criminalise those who speak out against migration.

But on top of all of that, there is a raft of new economic cash grabs, including a discriminatory policy that withdraws vital winter fuel payments from over 10 million, overwhelmingly White, pensioners in order to ensure that a raft of diverse and progressive policies can still be funded. But whilst all this is happening, whilst Labour is stripping us of our rights and signing off on what could effectively be a policy that leads to a cull of elderly White Britons, they have also been preparing an amnesty for over 100,000 illegal immigrants, as well as removing the final few remaining blockades to migrants entering the country.

And all these new Britons that are going to be granted the right to stay here, they won’t be facing the same financial crisis that us true Brits will! As Labour is committed to spending millions, if not billions, on making sure these people are cared for in every way imaginable! I have to emphasise this again, this is all within four months of Starmer being elected. They have not just turned up the temperature a little, they have gone straight to gas Mark 10 in the blink of an eye.

And on top of that, they are not even trying to hide it! Now at one time governments, especially the Conservatives, always the Conservatives, would usually dangle a carrot in order to soften the blow. But the current Labour establishment are so totally shameless and anti-White that they don’t even do that! Things have changed so much so that I don’t think going up to people and talking about migration and the idea of Whites becoming a minority would be something that anyone contested anymore.

Now, sure, I think you would find liberals out there, and those liberals would say:

“Yeah, the demographic shift is happening.”

And they’d be celebrating it. But they’d still admit that it was happening. They would say:

“They celebrated it.”

Rather than denying it.

But more importantly than accepting the facts on migration, which are of course important, is the fact that people are now aware that we live under a two tier system. A two tier system is in place where the indigenous people of these islands are automatically placed at a disadvantage when compared to both new arrivals and those from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Now, granted, the rules are a little more complex than what I have just stated, obviously White Britons who are part of the ruling elite, Whites who are part of far-Left organisations, or Whites who are part of degenerate, sickening subcultures, will get a pass. But normal White working folk are now clearly Second Class citizens! And worse still, if you are White and if you’re speaking out against mass immigration, multiculturalism or talking about demographic change, you will be treated as the lowest of the low! And you will have fewer rights than any other group in the country!

Now this in itself is not news to anyone in this room. We’ve known this was coming for a long time. We know if a member of an anti-fascist organisation punches someone, the police don’t care. If a nationalist defends himself and it’s self defence, you’re getting arrested. If a young black male sets fire to the Union Jack at the Cenotaph, it’s a suspended sentence. If a young White male kicks a policeman because three little White girls were murdered, it’s off to jail for 26 months!

And again, this isn’t news to us. We’ve seen this creeping up. We’ve known this was coming for years and we’ve spent, some of us, decades trying to warn the public.

But in the last few months, the dam has finally broken, when it comes to talking about this issue. The issue of “two tier policing” has gone mainstream. The term has been used in Parliament, in the media and in almost every major newspaper. The heat has been turned up so quickly that not even the press can deny what is happening. And the public are no longer deriding or ignoring what we say. They are openly voicing our talking points, which are increasingly becoming part of the everyday discourse in workplaces, in social clubs, in pubs and in homes all over Britain. This is a watershed moment for nationalists here in the UK! And it represents not some small or incremental shift, but a massive jump! But that jumps before you all start celebrating presents both great opportunities, but also serious dangers.

Let’s start with the good stuff. Let’s start with the opportunities. Never before has immigration been such a hot topic. Never before have so many people been openly concerned about demographic change. This isn’t just reflected in the way normal people are speaking. We’ve seen a massive change in the way that formerly race blind politicians, content creators, and influencers are reporting on the issue of immigration and anti-White policymaking. All of a sudden there is a palpable fear about the prospect of the UK becoming a country where the indigenous population are a minority. And there is also this growing concern of how White people would be treated if they were a minority. Even Nigel Farage has finally spoken about the ethnic makeup of our cities and even made an election pledge about deporting people.

Finally, the world is accepting the talking points that we have pushed for generations. The truth is breaking through!

However, we should not rejoice too much, because there’s a lot of negatives to this as well. The obvious negative is the way that Keir Starmer and the Labour government are approaching this mass awakening. In short, they are set on two courses of action.

The first is that they wish to accelerate mass immigration into Britain. The establishment have clearly acknowledged that there is a race going on between migration and the public consciousness of migration. On one hand, migration is increasing, but on the other, the public are now more aware that migration is this big threat and that it affects their lives in so many ways.

The race taking place now will decide whether Whites will become a minority before they become racially conscious enough on a wide enough scale to prevent themselves from becoming a minority. And the establishment is not run by idiots. They know how crucial this race is! Starmer and his cabinet know that if White people were to wake up before they were outnumbered, the game is up! Migration is ending, it will be reversed and we will remain a majority.

On the other hand, conversely, they also know if they can increase migration and Whites slip under a certain percentage of the population, it’s effectively game over! White Britons at that point will be destined to minority status!

So the first course of action the Starmer government will be set upon is to speed up White replacement to levels that we have never seen before. And on top of all of that, they have something going in their favour. They already know that we are reaching that tipping point, that the point of no return is not very far off at this juncture. With hundreds of thousands of White Britons leaving the country every year to run from this nightmare, with millions of migrants coming in with birth rates being overwhelmingly in favour of migrant communities, they will surely at this point, think that victory is in their grasp.

And if you want a bit of perspective on this isn’t just me saying this, I’m going to give you the latest figures. It was either this week or last week a report was published. Over the last 12 months. For the first time since 1976, deaths outstripped births here in the UK. Now, you don’t have to be a genius to work out that should lead to a falling population.

Yes? But over the same 12 months, our population grew by the fastest rate it ever has in history! We cannot hide from the fact that we are now being replaced faster than we ever have before.

Now, you think that’s bad, but their second, and I said that was the first course of action. Their second course of action is actually worse than the first. And I know what you’re thinking, how on earth could something be worse than speeding up mass immigration to the point where we become a minority even faster? Well, it’s simple.

Their second course of action is to effectively terrorize White people so that even if Whites become racially conscious on a much larger scale, most of those who understand the truth will be too scared, too browbeaten, to ever speak out about the issue! Effectively meaning that the racially conscious White Britons will sit in silence rather than stand up and join our chorus of dissent.

Now, the astute amongst you will have noticed I used a term there. I said “terrorize”. And I use that term for a specific reason. You see, whilst the government loves to use the word “terrorism” to describe those who espouse views that they don’t like, there is a bitter irony to them using that word in such a way. You see, the words “terrorism” and “terrorist” came into English use as translations of words used in France during the period known as “The Reign of Terror” that took place between 1793 and 1794.

And during that era, the newly installed French government punished, usually by death, those people who were thought to be against the ongoing revolution. Those words came into existence thanks to a gruesome and protracted period of state sponsored violence. It is quite amazing really. The words terrorism and terrorist were originally words used to describe brutal acts of oppression by the State directed against those who spoke out against the state. Or in many cases, those acts of brutal oppression were used against people who were merely perceived to be going against the state. And that is exactly what we’re seeing here now in Britain!

When you see mothers dragged out of their homes for social media posts, when you see working men sent to prison for shouting at police officers, and when you see hard working fathers jailed for minor offences like throwing a traffic cone towards police officers we are living in times of political oppression that can only be described as “state sponsored terror”! We are moving toward a point where holding the wrong opinions will be seen as almost a capital crime, where saying the wrong words to the wrong person will see you receive a sentence longer than what a sex offender would receive.

And this worrying shift towards a complete and total clampdown on freedom of speech and freedom of expression is exactly what I would have predicted from this Labour government. This clampdown has the potential to be the most comprehensive in history, because it is backed by a surveillance state that is unrivaled!

But just as worryingly, it will also be supported by the same disgusting, sniveling people who snitched on their neighbours during the Covid lockdowns. The kind of people who phoned the police when people on their street didn’t come out of their homes at the allotted time to clap like demented seals for the NHS.

Make no mistake, we are now presented with the greatest opportunity that nationalists have seen in a lifetime! But we are also presented with the most draconian laws, the most oppressive system, and a surveillance network that makes anything written in 1984 look like a joke!

But the talk of this takes me back to a different time, a time when I was a young man and how politics was when I first joined this struggle. When I first got involved, I joined the BNP. At the time, the BNP was trying to hide their re-migration policy. The party played down talk of sending people home. We never spoke of it, we never featured it in publicity material and we actually treated it as if it was our dirty little secret. It was something that we spoke of behind closed doors.

We called it the Repatriation Policy. And the party watered it down! Hid it on their website, and had a policy of never speaking about it, never putting it on leaflets, never talking about it at meetings, and definitely never, ever mentioning it in a media interview!

Today, however, several decades on “re-migration” is a buzzword. For the first time in my lifetime, re-migration is a rallying cry that is posted tens of thousands of times a day on social media. Deportation is demanded by sitting MPs. Normal people are discussing sending them back!

Remigration for the first time in a generation is seen not just as a viable solution, but as a necessary solution! Remigration is not just the battle cry of nationalists, but something that normal people are now openly desiring. Remigration is now rightly seen as the only solution that can save us from becoming a minority. It is what we need in order to survive!

But before we celebrate and before we cheer, there is a flip side to that. Remigration is also a term that could soon become illegal. Calls for re-migration and deportation could well be outlawed as terms that are “likely to stir up racial hatred”. And I say “likely” because that is the new word that will be the new bar when deciding whether speech is hate speech. At one time, speech would have to be abusive, insulting or threatening.

But now the Labour government wished to change this to the lower threshold of merely “likely to stir up racial hatred”.

So on one hand, we see a golden opportunity, we see progress and we see the public increasingly accepting our talking points in larger and larger numbers. And most of all, we are finally seeing re-migration being discussed, normalised and even adopted in other Western nations.

But on the other hand, we have these draconian laws, a surveillance state, two tier justice and a clampdown on our freedoms that even George Orwell would never have predicted. Make no mistake my friends, this is a high stakes game. Everything is on the line! All the chips are on the table! And we stand to gain everything. But we also stand to personally forfeit everything if the state singles us out for persecution.

And I’m not going to stand here and lie to you. The risk is real. There are people now in jail cells serving multi-year sentences for saying the wrong thing, attending the wrong protest, or even publishing stickers that the Crown stated were completely legal.

So the question that people will ask me is:

“Where do we go from here?”

Well, we are going to do something that no other group has ever attempted to do here in the UK.

Firstly, we will remain as the community building group we have always been. At the centre of everything we do will remain this community, but we will become an indigenous rights advocacy and pressure group. The only group in the UK that will fight for the rights of the indigenous people of this country who face discrimination, abuse or even jail. We will use this community that we have built to be both a support network and a shield wall for those whom the system attacks.

And the thing that makes me the most proud is that we have already begun doing this. Since the recent anti-migrant protests, we as a community have already raised £15,000 for the families of those who have been jailed for either speech crimes, non-crimes, such as shouting at the police, or being present when disorder took place, and for people who were jailed for minor infractions.

[applause]

And this is a bold move, not just because no one else is doing it, but also because I believe it’s the one thing our people need the most. They need a community that stands behind them when the state comes knocking on their door!

But that sadly brings me to the most uncomfortable part of what I’m going to say today. With this clampdown, with this high stakes battle for our future, with tensions in the  country reaching boiling point and with political persecution reaching levels that we have never seen before, I expect that some people who were once very active in this movement will take their leave. The idea of going to jail or becoming a social pariah will simply be too much for them. These people will look at political prisoners like Sam Melia, and whilst they will admire them and want to support them, they will be terrified of being in their shoes.

Some people will now decide certain things can’t be discussed. They will quietly fall in line with the government’s new mandates, and they will behave like trained dogs, understanding exactly what their masters expect of them.

But I’m sure there is a question here for me. What will I do? And I say I because I am speaking for me. And on this topic, I can’t speak for you. But I will carry on despite the associated risks, because I believe more than anything that what we do is right!

[standing applause]

And people have asked me this. When I say people, I mean members of the public, people in this room, my friends, even my family. They’ve said:

“Mark, is this worth going to jail for? Was this all worth losing your bank accounts? Was this all worth becoming a social pariah that can’t do many of the things that normal people do?”

And I look at them and smile and say:

“The answer is unequivocally yes!”

[applause]

You see, sometimes in life there are bigger things at stake than your own individual well being, your own financial security, and your own social status. From a young age, I acknowledged that the most important thing was the survival of people of European descent!

[applause]

I acknowledged that if we as a people cease to exist, anything that I achieve as an individual in my life would be irrelevant. And now I look at the current situation and I know the risks are greater than ever! I know the establishment will continue to tighten the noose around our necks, choking our freedoms.

But I have done this for long enough to know that the establishment’s actions do not come from a place of strength. Instead, they come from a place of fear and uncertainty. The establishment knows that the cracks in the Multicultural Project are growing by the day. And that’s why they are desperate to pass these new laws as they know the truth is breaking through. And their only hope now is not to hide the truth, because they can’t do that anymore! Their only hope now is to stop people speaking the truth that they already know! They aren’t jailing nationalists because they’re winning. They are jailing nationalists because they’re finally losing their grasp on power!

And that’s why, at this crucial juncture, despite the increased risks, I believe it is time to grit our teeth, to dig our heels in and fight harder:

“But what about our freedom?”

People will cry. Well, the answer to that is simple. Being free is about being able to live as you wish. Being able to say what you want, to be able to do what you please, and to associate with those whom you love. If you can’t do those things, if you choose to self censor, and if you give up on your beliefs, if you are forced to turn your back on your comrades and friends, one thing is for sure, you are not free. You are a prisoner in their system. But worse still, you are a prisoner by consent! And I for one, am not going to consent to being a prisoner of their system. I do not consent to spending my life on my knees for anyone. Especially not a system that despises me, my family, my friends and my people.

[applause]

My message today is clear. Despite the hardships, despite the increasing oppression, and despite what may seem like overwhelming odds, we will never be silenced!

But more so, we will give a voice to those who the system tries to silence. We will be the support network for the most oppressed, trampled people in this country, white people who dare to oppose their own replacement. We are engaged in this struggle because we understand one thing. The most precious thing in the whole world is our people! And the survival of our people is non-negotiable!

So despite the increasing tyranny that we face, we will never stop fighting. And even if our brave comrades are arrested and dragged away from their families and imprisoned, their heads will not be bowed, their flame will not dim, and they will not be forgotten. Quite the opposite in fact. Their heads will be held up high. Their names will be known by more people than they could ever have imagined. Their fight against this system will be spoken of not only the length and breadth of the country, but it will be spoken of all over the Western world.

Because those who dare to fight in the darkest of times are the heroes that will ensure that tomorrow belongs to us!

Thank you.

Source →

Not yet to have digested the affront of being born

 If instead of expanding you, putting you in a state of energetic euphoria, your ordeals depress and embitter you, you can be sure you have no spiritual vocation.

To live in expectation, to count on the future or on a simulacrum of the future: we are so accustomed to it that we have conceived the idea of immortality only out of a need to wait out eternity.Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds.

Luther Dead by Lucas Fortnagel. A plebeian, aggressive, terrifying mask, as of some sublime hog … which perfectly renders the features of the man we cannot sufficiently praise for having declared: “Dreams are liars; if you shit in your bed, that’s true.”

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

At twenty, those nights when for hours at a time I would stand, forehead pressed against the pane, staring into the dark….

No autocrat wields a power comparable to that enjoyed by a poor devil planning to kill himself.

Educating yourself not to leave traces is a moment-by-momcnt war against yourself, solely to prove that you could, if you chose, become a sage….

To exist is a state as little conceivable as its contrary. No, still more inconceivable.

In Antiquity, “books” were so costly that one could not accumulate them unless one was a king, a tyrant, or … Aristotle, the first to possess a library worthy of the name.

One more incriminating item in the dossier of a philosopher already so catastrophic in so many regards.

If I were to conform to my most intimate convictions, I should cease to take any action whatever, to react in any way. But I am still capable of sensations….

A monster, however horrible, secretly attracts us, pursues us, haunts us. He represents, enlarged, our advantages and our miseries, he proclaims us, he is our standard-bearer.

Over the centuries, man has slaved to believe, passing from dogma to dogma, illusion to illusion, and has given very little time to doubts, short intervals between his epochs of blindness. Indeed they were not doubts but pauses, moments of respite following the fatigue of faith, of any faith.

Innocence being the perfect state, perhaps the only one, it is incomprehensible that a man enjoying it should seek to leave it. Yet history from its beginnings down to ourselves is only that and nothing but that.

I draw the curtains, and I wait. Actually, I am not waiting for anything, I am merely making myself absent. Scoured, if only for a few minutes, of the impurities which dim and clog the mind, I accede to a state of consciousness from which the self is evacuated, and I am as soothed as if I were resting outside the universe.

In one medieval exorcism, all the parts of the body, even the smallest, are listed from which the demon is ordered to depart: a kind of lunatic anatomy treatise, fascinating for its hypertrophy of precision, its profusion of unexpected details. A scrupulous incantation. Leave the nails! Fanatic but not without poetic effect. For authentic poetry has nothing in common with “poetry.”

In all our dreams, even if they deal with the Flood, there Is always, if only for a fraction of a second, some minuscule Incident we witnessed the day before. This regularity, which I have verified for years, is the only constant, the only law or semblance of law I have been able to discern In night’s incredible chaos.

The dissolving power of conversation. One realizes why both meditation and action require silence.

The certainty of being only an accident has accompanied me on all occasions, propitious or injurious, and if it has saved me from the temptation to believe myself necessary, it has not on the other hand entirely cured me of a certain vainglory inherent in the loss of illusions.

Rare to come upon a free mind, and when you do, you realize that the best of such a mind is not revealed in its works (when we write we bear, mysteriously, chains) but in those confidences where, released from conviction and pose, as from all concern with rigor or standing, it displays its weaknesses. And where it behaves as a heretic to itself.

If the foreigner is not a creator in the matter of language, it is because he wants to do as well as the natives: whether or not he succeeds, this ambition is his downfall.

I begin a letter over and over again, I get nowhere: what to say and how to say it? I don’t even remember whom I was writing to. Only passion or profit find at once the right tone. Unfortunately detachment is indifference to language, insensitivity to words. Yet It is by losing contact with words that we lose contact with human beings.

Everyone has had, at a given moment, an extraordinary experience which will be for him, because of the memory of it he preserves, the crucial obstacle to his Inner metamorphosis.

I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels Is ambitious. Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.

Going to India because of the Vedanta or Buddhism is about the same as going to France because of Jansenism. Moreover the latter is more recent, since it vanished only three centuries ago.

Not the slightest trace of reality anywhere—except in my sensations of unreality.

Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.

Why docs the Gita rank “renunciation of the fruit of actions” so high? Because such renunciation is rare, impracticable, contrary to our nature, and because achieving it is destroying the man one has been and one is, killing in oneself the entire past, the work of millennia—in a word, freeing oneself of the Species, that hideous and immemorial riffraff.

We should have abided by our larval condition, dispensed with evolution, remained incomplete, delighting in the elemental siesta and calmly consuming ourselves in an embryonic ecstasy.

Truth abides in the individual drama. If I suffer authentically, I suffer much more than an individual, I transcend the sphere of my selfhood, I rejoin the essence of others. The only way to proceed toward the universal is to concern ourselves exclusively with what concerns ourselves.

When we are fixated on doubt, we take more pleasure in lavishing speculations upon it than in practicing it.

If you want to know a nation, frequent its second-order writers: they alone reflect its true nature. The others denounce or transfigure the nullity of their compatriots, and neither can nor will put themselves on the same level. They are suspect witnesses.

In my youth there would be weeks during which I never closed my eyes. I lived in the unlived world, I had the sense that Time, with all its moments, had concentrated itself within me, where it culminated, where it triumphed. I moved it onward, of course, I was its promoter and bearer, its cause and substance, and it was as an agent and accomplice that I participated in its apotheosis. When sleep departs from us, the unheard-of becomes everyday, easy: we enter it without preparations, inhabit it, wallow in it.

Astounding, the number of hours I have wasted on ? the “meaning” of what exists, of what happens…. But that “what” has no meaning, as all serious minds know. Hence they devote their time and their energy to more useful undertakings.

My affinities with Russian Byronism, from Pechorin to Stavro-gin, my boredom and my passion for boredom.

X, whom I do not particularly appreciate, was telling a story so stupid that I wakened with a start: those we don’t like rarely shine in our dreams.

For lack of occupation, the old seem to be trying to solve something very complicated, devoting to it all the capacities they still possess. Perhaps this is why they do not commit suicide en masse, as they ought were they even a trifle less absorbed.

Love at its most impassioned does not bring two human beings so close together as calumny. Inseparable, slanderer and slandered constitute a “transcendent” unity, forever welded one to the other. Nothing can separate them. One inflicts harm, the other endures it, but if he endures it, it is because he is accustomed to doing so, can no longer do without it, even insists upon it. He knows that his wishes will be gratified, that he will never be forgotten, that whatever happens he will be eternally present in the mind of his indefatigable benefactor.

The monk-errant, the wandering friar—so far, the supreme achievement. To reach the point of no longer having anything to renounce! Such must be the dream of any disabused mind.

Sobbing negation—the only tolerable form of negation.

Lucky Job, who was not obliged to annotate his lamentations!

Late at night I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don’t see against whom, against what …

Mme d’Heudicourt, Saint-Simon observes, had never spoken good of anyone In her life without adding some crushing “but’s.” A wonderful definition, not of backbiting but of conversation in general.

Everything that lives makes noise. What an argument for the mineral kingdom!

Bach was quarrelsome, litigious, self-serving, greedy for titles and honors, etc. So what! A musicologist listing the cantatas whose theme is death has remarked that no mortal ever had such a nostalgia for it. Which is all that counts. The rest has to do with biography.

The misfortune of being incapable of neutral states except by reflection and effort. What an idiot achieves at the outset, we must struggle night and day to attain, and only by fits and starts!

I have always lived with the vision of a host of moments marching against me. Time will have been my Birnam Wood.

Painful or wounding questions asked by the uncouth distress and anger us, and may have the same effect as certain techniques of Oriental meditation. Who knows if a dense, aggressive stupidity might not provoke illumination? It is certainly worth as much as a rap on the head with a stick.

Knowledge is not possible, and even if it were, would solve nothing. Such is the doubter’s position. What does he want, then—what is he looking for? Neither he nor anyone will ever know. Skepticism is the rapture of impasse.

Besieged by others, I try to make my escape, without much success, it must be confessed. Yet I manage to wangle myself, day by day, a few seconds’ audience with the man I would have liked to be.

By a certain age, we should change names and hide out somewhere, lost to the world, in no danger of seeing friends or enemies again, leading the peaceful life of an overworked malefactor.

We cannot reflect and be modest. Once the mind is set to work, it replaces God and anything else. It is indiscretion, encroachment, profanation. It does not build, it dislocates. The tension its methods betray reveals its brutal, implacable character: without a good dose of ferocity, we could not follow a thought to its conclusion.

Most subverters, visionaries, and saviors have been either epileptics or dyspeptics. There is unanimity as to the virtues of epilepsy; gastric upheavals are regarded, on the other hand, as less meritorious. Yet nothing is more conducive to subversion than a digestion which refuses to be forgotten.

My mission Is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

Each time Time torments me, I tell myself that one of us must back down, that it is impossible for this cruel confrontation to go on indefinitely.

When we are in the depths of depression, everything which feeds it, affords it further substance, also raises it to a level where we can no longer follow and thereby renders it too great, excessive: scarcely surprising that we should reach the point of no longer regarding it as our own.

A foretold misfortune, when at last it occurs, is ten, is a hundred times harder to endure than one we did not expect. All during our apprehensions, we lived through it in advance, and when it happens these past torments are added to the present ones, and together they form a mass whose weight is intolerable.

Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory will ever be found again.

I shall never utterly admire anyone except a man dishonored—and happy. There is a man, I should say, who defies the opinion of his fellows and who finds consolation and happiness in himself alone.

The man of the Rubicon, after Pharsalus, had forgiven too many. Such magnanimity seemed offensive to those of his friends who had betrayed him and whom he had humiliated by treating them without rancor. They felt diminished, flouted, and punished him for his clemency or for his disdain: he had refused to stoop to resentment! Had he behaved as a tyrant, they would have spared him. But they could not forgive him, since he had not deigned to frighten them enough.

Everything that is engenders, sooner or later, nightmares. Let us try, therefore, to invent something better than being.

Philosophy, which had made it its business to undermine beliefs, when it saw Christianity spreading and on the point of prevailing, made common cause with paganism, whose superstitions seemed preferable to the triumphant insanities. By attacking and demolishing the gods, philosophy had intended to free men’s minds; in reality, it handed them over to a new servitude, worse than the old one, for the god who was to replace the gods had no particular weakness for either tolerance or irony.

Philosophy, it will be objected, is not responsible for the advent of this god, indeed this was not the god philosophy recommended. No doubt, but it should have suspected that we do not subvert the gods with impunity, that others would come to take their place, and that it had nothing to gain by the exchange.

Fanaticism is the death of conversation. We do not gossip with a candidate for martyrdom. What are we to say to someone who refuses to penetrate our reasons and who, the moment we do not bow to his, would rather die than yield? Give us dilettantes and sophists, who at least espouse all reasons….

We invest ourselves with an abusive superiority when we tell someone what we think of him and of what he does. Frankness is not compatible with a delicate sentiment, nor even with an ethical exigency.

More than all others, our relatives are ready to doubt our merits. It is a universal rule: Buddha himself did not escape it—one of his cousins opposed him the most, and only afterward Mara, the devil.

For the victim of anxiety, there is no difference between success and fiasco. His reaction to the one is the same as to the other: both trouble him equally.

When I torment myself a little too much for not working, I tell myself that I might just as well be dead and that then I would be working still less….

Rather in a gutter than on a pedestal.

The advantages of a state of eternal potentiality seem to me so considerable that when I begin listing them, I can’t get over the fact that the transition to Being could ever have occurred.

Existence = Torment. The equation seems obvious to me, but not to one of my friends. How to convince him? I cannot lend him my sensations; yet only they would have the power to persuade him, to give him that additional dose of ill-being he has so insistently asked for all this time.

If we see things black, it is because we weigh them in the dark, because thoughts are generally the fruit of sleeplessness, consequently of darkness. They cannot adapt to life because they have not been thought with a view to life. The notion of the consequences they might involve doesn’t even occur to the mind. We are beyond all human calculation, beyond any notion of salvation or perdition, of being or non-being, we are in a particular silence, a superior modality of the void.

Not yet to have digested the affront of being born.

To expend oneself in conversations as much as an epileptic in his fits.

In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all In order not to have to resort to it too often in the course of a day, best to experience its benefit straight off, when you get up. Or else use It only at exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at It each time he had to make some important decision.

There is no negator who is not famished for some catastrophic yes.

We may be sure that man will never reach depths comparable to those he knew during the ages of egoistic colloquy with bis God.

Not one moment when I am not external to the universe! … No sooner have I lamented over myself, pitying my wretched condition, than I realize that the terms in which I described my misfortune were precisely those which define the first characteristic of the “supreme being.”

Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel—three enslavers of the mind. The worst form of despotism is the system, in philosophy and in everything.

God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.

When I was young, no pleasure compared with the pleasure of making enemies. Now, whenever I make one, my first thought is to be reconciled, so that I won’t have to bother about him. Having enemies is a heavy responsibility. My burden is sufficient, I no longer can carry that of others as well.

Joy is a light which devours itself, inexhaustibly; it is the sun early on.

A few days before he died, Claudel remarked that we should not call God infinite but inexhaustible. As if it did not come down to the same thing, or just about! All the same, this concern for exactitude, this verbal scruple at the moment that he was writing that his “lease” on life had nearly expired, is more inspiring than a “sublime” word or gesture.

The unusual is not a criterion. Paganini is more surprising and more unpredictable than Bach.

We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth’s surface. One, and no more. This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion, … Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does.

Tsimtsum. This silly-sounding word designates a major concept of the Cabbala. For the world to exist, God, who was everything and everywhere, consented to shrink, to leave a vacant space not inhabited by Himself: it is in this “hole” that the world occurred.

Thus we occupy the wasteland He conceded to us out of pity or whim. For us to exist, He contracted, He limited His sovereignty. We are the product of His voluntary reduction, of His effacement, of His partial absence. In His madness He has actually amputated Himself for us. If only He had had the good sense and the good taste to remain whole!

In the “Gospel According to the Egyptians,” Jesus proclaims: “Men will be the victims of death so long as women give birth.” And he specifies: “I am come to destroy the works of woman.”

When we frequent the extreme truths of the Gnostics, we should like to go, if possible, still further, to say something never said, which petrifies or pulverizes history, something out of a cosmic Neronianism, out of a madness on the scale of matter.

To express an obsession is to project it outside yourself, to hunt it down, to exorcise it. Obsessions are the demons of a world without faith.

Man accepts death but not the hour of his death. To die any time, except when one has to die!

Once we step into a cemetery, a feeling of utter mockery does away with any metaphysical concern. Those who look for “mystery” everywhere do not necessarily get to the bottom of things. Most often “mystery,” like “the absolute,” corresponds only to a mannerism of the mind. It is a word we should use only when we cannot do otherwise, in really desperate cases.

If I recapitulate my plans which have remained plans and those which have worked out, I have every reason to regret that these latter have not suffered the fate of the former.

“He who is inclined to lust is merciful and tender-hearted; those who are inclined to purity are not so” (Saint John Climacus). It took a saint, neither more nor less, to denounce so distinctly and so vigorously not the lies but the very essence of Christian morality, and indeed of all morality.

We are not afraid to accept the notion of an uninterrupted sleep; on the other hand an eternal awakening (immortality, if it were conceivable, would be just that) plunges us into dread. Unconsciousness is a country, a fatherland; consciousness, an exile.

Any profound impression is voluptuous or funereal—or both at once.

No one has been so convinced as I of the futility of everything; and no one has taken so tragically so many futile things.

Ishi, the last American Indian of his tribe, after hiding for years in terror of the White Men, reduced to starvation, surrendered of his own free will to the exterminators of his people, believing that the same treatment was in store for himself. He was made much of. He had no posterity, he was truly the last.

Once humanity is destroyed or simply extinguished, we may imagine a sole survivor who would wander the earth, without even having anyone to surrender to….

Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there.

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, larger phenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease of time; life, again, a disease of matter.

Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itself is only an infirmity of God.

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born 

Learning Haiku from Antonio Porchia

Poems About Nothing
Learning Haiku from Antonio Porchia

 Michael Dylan Welch

ABSTRACT: Th rough the aphorisms of his only book, Voices, first published in 1943, Argentine poet Antonio Porchia has proved to be popular around the world in various translations, especially those in English by W. S. Merwin. This essay reviews twenty-five selected aphorisms for their relevance to reading and writing haiku poetry in English, focusing largely on Porchia’s ideas regarding “nothingness” and how they apply to haiku poetry — leading to the conclusion that haiku may be considered “poems about nothing.” Porchia teaches haiku poets that they can embrace nothingness in the way they can embrace the mereness of now as simultaneously significant and yet insignificant in relation to infinity. The essay folds in numerous tangential but essential ideas, contexts, and other quotations, and includes seventeen haiku by various poets on the theme of nothingness.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“The listener beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
—Wallace Stevens
“Saying nothing sometimes says the most.” —Emily Dickinson

In 1943, Argentine poet Antonio Porchia (1885 – 1968) published Voices in a small private edition, and expanded it in 1947 — his only book. It collects hundreds of the author’s poignant and timeless aphorisms, but they are considered so poetic that Porchia is referred to not as a nonfiction writer but as a poet. Over the years his book gained a cult following and has been published in many editions and translated into several languages, notably into English by W. S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press, 2003). The Wikipedia page for Porchia says “Some critics have paralleled his work to Japanese haiku and found many similarities with a number of Zen schools of thought.” No citation is given for this claim, but in speaking of Porchia elsewhere, Jorge Luis Borges has been quoted as saying that “he was creating for others the image of a lonely man, who sees things with clarity and is conscious of the unique mystery of every moment.” This sounds like the spirit of haiku, does it not? In first introducing his translations in 1969, Merwin wrote that “A few of the aphorisms have close affinities with sentences from Taoist and Buddhist scriptures,” adding that “the authority which the entries invoke, both in their matter and in their tone, is not that of tradition or antecedents, but that of particular individual experience” (viii). This observation suggests at least some level of an affinity with haiku, or at least a haiku sensibility.
Beyond this philosophical overlay, however, it seems that the comparison of Porchia’s aphorisms to haiku rests chiefly on their brevity. Merwin does note that each aphorism is coloured by immediacy, but it’s an immediacy of ideas, not experience, thus they might be considered something other than haiku. In his 1988 introduction to an expanded book of his translations, Merwin quotes the poet Roberto Juarroz, who knew Porchia closely, as referring to Porchia’s “unusual and deepening attention” (xii), but again, this seems to be an attention — at least in the aphorisms — to words, ideas, and the intellect, and less to the five senses of personal experience that typically serve as the primary realm of haiku poetry. And yet, as Merwin notes, “Porchia the man was something of a mystery” (xi), so we may never know.

[He was born ariya, but this merely relocates mystery, at least for the most readers.]

Ultimately, nothing in the aphorisms themselves feels haiku-like other than the occasional image from nature and their shortness — and even then, most of them are longer than haiku. Nevertheless, Antonio Porchia still has something to say about haiku through his aphorisms.
He teaches us, I propose, that haiku are poems about nothing, in a very positive manner. Nothing is the same as everything. He teaches us that we can embrace nothingness in the way we can embrace the mereness of now as simultaneously significant and yet insignificant in relation to infinity. This is because, in fact, they are one and the same.

“Situated in some nebulous distance I do what I do so that the universal balance of which I am a part may remain a balance.” (3)

Bashō told us to learn of the pine from the pine, not just so that we might write with authenticity, but also to recognize that we are not merely observers of nature but part of it. We are part of a whole. It seems that haiku recognizes this wholeness, and seeks to preserve it — thus its appeal as a kind of ecopoetry. As haiku poets we may sometimes feel a nebulous distance between us and what we might write about, but in some sense it is illusory. We are part of everything, and it’s our challenge, even duty, as haiku poets, to maintain a balance with what we observe and our relation to it. We are even part of what we write. As Bashō said, “When composing a verse let there not be a hair’s breadth separating your mind from what you write.”

“The little things are what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity.” (5)

Haiku are poems about those little things, and they speak of the infinite, the full and expansive. It’s the big things, whatever we may take that to mean, that are really small — that is, not of eternal value. In a paradoxical way, haiku dwell on the seemingly ephemeral minutia of daily life that may turn out to be the most important details of our existence. As Rilke once said, “If your everyday life seems poor don’t blame it; blame yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches.”

dissatisfied —
polishing the new haiku
till nothing is left 
Patricia Neubauer, Bottle Rockets #17, 9:1, 2007, 21

Pare everything down to almost nothing,
then cut the rest, and you’ve got
the poem I’m trying to write.

David Budbill, Bottle Rockets #30, 2014, 57

“One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.” (11)

Perhaps haiku, too, may come into being in the hope of being remembered, just as each poem makes the experience it celebrates memorable. If humans live in the hope of being remembered, perhaps haiku poets can accomplish this through their poetry and their valuing of the ephemeral. Indeed, if anything, it could be that our poems are remembered instead of us.

butterfly —
I remember
nothing 
Robert Kania, The Heron’s Nest 16:1, March 2014, 2

“Nothing that is complete breathes.” (13)

Many of Porchia’s observations speak of nothingness. We may take this particular observation to speak of the incompleteness that earmarks each haiku — Seisensui referred to haiku as an “incomplete” poem, relying on the reader’s interaction to complete it. In this way, each haiku poem remains forever alive, forever in need of human interaction to complete it. When the poem has said too much, and completes itself, then the poem dies.

“He who tells the truth says almost nothing.” (25)

A chief goal of haiku to strive after authenticity, that is, to tell the truth, is counterbalanced by the reality that even the truth is nothing. Rather than despairing in such a suffering point of view, Porchia’s book is one of accepting this suffering, of accepting the nothingness of existence. Where haiku point out the most ephemeral and insignificant of details, they may partake of the eternal and the infinite, yet they are still nothing. But Porchia says “almost.” This reminds me of Issa’s poem about the world being merely a world of dew . . . “and yet.”

Whatever I say
a dewdrop says much better
saying nothing now.

Cid Corman, Modern Haiku 35:1, Winter–Spring 2004, 86

“When I believe that the stone is stone and the cloud cloud, I am in a state of unconsciousness.” (33)

This is an example of Porchia’s thought that echoes Buddhist or Taoist beliefs. Here I am also reminded of Richard Gilbert, who refers to haiku as “poems of consciousness.”

That may be, and one can take many paths to haiku, but the integration of going to the pine to learn of the pine would seem to speak of the unconsciousness that Porchia mentions, the way a chess master does not have to think consciously about avoiding bad moves. As D.  T. Suzuki put it in his introduction to Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery, “One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an ‘artless art’ growing out of the Unconscious.” When we are one with the subject of our contemplation — that art thou — we are not conscious of this oneness, this suchness. Rather, we are oneness and suchness. Fish, as they say, are unaware of water.

“They will say that you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.” (35)

Everyone must find his or her own road for haiku — and I do mean for haiku, not to haiku. Plenty of pundits, me included, may well suggest or feel that a particular poet is on the wrong road, but ultimately each of us must always find our own way. Yet this does not mean we should completely ignore the advice of others, especially when they have experience that we are just beginning to explore. There are no shortcuts to haiku, but there may well be overpasses, and we can certainly seek guidance from those who have travelled similar paths.

winter dusk
a path that stops
at nothing 
Matt Morden, Presence 49, January 2014

“We become aware of the void as we fill it.” (43)

Everything is nothing. We are all part of the void. But again, this is not a nihilistic resignation but an acceptance of that void. But what does it mean to become aware of the void, or to fill the void ourselves? How does this relate to haiku poetry? We may find the answer in every good haiku we read, especially in the way it makes us aware of what we already knew, but didn’t realize that we knew. That’s how we fill the void with our haiku.

“A hundred years die in a moment, just as a moment dies in a moment.” (45)

Ah, the ephemerality of haiku. Even a hundred years is nothing, in terms of time. Same with a million billion trillion years. I think of Carole MacRury’s poem (Haiku Friends Volume 2, Masaharu Hirata, ed., Osaka, Japan: Umeda Printing Factory, 2007, 68):

heat wave 
the horse blinks away 
a gnat’s life

And yet a millionth billionth trillionth of a nanosecond is equally valuable. And simply equal. If we do not grasp this verisimilitude, perhaps we do not grasp the wonder of haiku. As Diane Ackerman once said, “Wonder is the heaviest element in the periodic table of the heart. Even a tiny piece of it can stop time.”

“Only a few arrive at nothing, because the way is long.” (51)

Yes, perhaps haiku is nothing, a dissolving into the merest image, the merest subtlety, the merest moment. But getting there, to the point of finding value in nothingness, is indeed often a long road.

“Certainties are arrived at only on foot.” (53)

If the road to haiku is long, like the road to nothingness, our road will not be certain for us if we try to take shortcuts. A journey of a thousand miles always begins with a single step. But more than being an inspiration to start, this adage is a reminder that it’s the process of stepping and stepping again that gets us to any kind of certainty. This is the value of pilgrimages such as the Shikoku Henro in Japan, or the Camino de Santiago in Spain, taken one step at a time. I also appreciate Porchia’s candor, amid his intellectual musings, that we must remain practical, real, and on solid ground.

And yet, and yet.

ground fog
I am certain
of nothing 

Scott Mason, third place, 2013 Porad Haiku Award

“A child shows his toy, a man hides his.” (55)

Haiku has been described as having a childlike point of view, of being wide-eyed in wonder at the world around us. This is what I believe Bashō meant when he said, “To write haiku, get a three-foot child.” We delight in our discoveries as haiku poets, our daily uncoverings of experience. If we are shy about sharing, this may happen because we do not have the child’s joy of discovery and curiosity. It is well worth cultivating. No wonder William J. Higginson began his Haiku Handbook by saying that the point of haiku is to share them. Sharing one’s haiku is an act of joy.

“Some things become so completely our own that we forget them.” (55)

This thought brings to mind Bashō’s proposal to learn the rules and then forget them. He did not mean, in my estimation, to learn the rules in order to forget them, or to ignore them. Rather, by learning the rules, and internalizing them deeply, we will end up forgetting them — that is, we will no longer be conscious of them, like fish that know nothing of water. In a practical sense, in writing our haiku, this means that we have integrated the haiku way of life so deeply that observing, feeling, and writing about our experiences becomes ingrained, as do the most reliable techniques for writing these poems. It becomes who we are to do this. And in doing this, that’s the moment when we forget the haiku way — because it has become so completely our own.

“I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.” (61)

In crafting our haiku, it seems reasonable to refine them in such a way that we prevent misreading. There’s a point where ambiguity goes too far and confuses rather than expands meaning. Yet no matter where we think we’ve gone with our haiku, or what we think we are giving to others through our poems, the reader may receive something different. There is value in letting each poem go, in trusting that each poem will find its audience, and in our being content with the fact that some poems may fi nd their own audience without us.

“The shadows: some hide, others reveal.” (61)

Haiku dwell in shadows — celebrating the partially revealed, the partially hidden. The subject of shadows themselves may be overdone in haiku, in that it can be exceedingly hard to write freshly about any kind of physical shadow, but to the extent that our haiku are shadowlike, metaphorically, we can endlessly partake in the ritual of sharing our haiku, in hiding and revealing. It’s because of its shadows that haiku is an unfinished poem. The reader adds light.

reaching
for the butterfly
nothing but shadow 

Jeff Hoagland, Bottle Rockets #26, 2012, 35

“Everything is a little bit of darkness, even the light.” (69)

This thought may well extend the previous one, that the reader adds light to the author’s shadows. Yet even the light we add has its own shadows. Every haiku is a shadow of meaning, written out of the darkness of life, with shades of Lorca’s duende.

“My bits of time play with eternity.” (73)

This is a comment about the author’s bits of time. But, for Antonio Porchia, what were those bits of time? What was his daily life like in Buenos Aires? What were the moments that he might have written haiku about? In an alternate world, perhaps there’s an undiscovered manuscript of Porchia’s haiku. But unless we can visit that world, we might just have to write those haiku ourselves. In each one, by focusing on the moment, we can play with eternity. In each one, by focusing on nothing, we can play with everything.

“In its last moment the whole of my life will last only a moment.” (79)

There’s that eternity in a grain of sand again. Here I think of the Japanese tradition of writing a death poem, or jisei. The following example is by Banzan, who died in 1730, from Yoel Hoffman’s Japanese Death Poems (Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle, 1986, 143):

farewell — 
I pass as all things do 
dew on the grass

“Every time I wake I understand how easy it is to be nothing.” (79)

Once again we feel an acceptance of the nothingness and even the suffering of life (another theme of Porchia’s aphorisms, even if not often referred to here). As Samuel Beckett once said, “Nothing is more real than nothing.”

rain falling
through smoke
maybe nothing matters 

Michael Ketchek, Frogpond 30:2, Spring/Summer 2007, 30

And as W. H. Auden said, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Or perhaps it’s the other way around.

“A full heart has room for everything, and an empty heart has room for nothing. Who understands?” (91)

Porchia also says “A large heart can be filled with very little” (93). One of the joys of haiku is that it fills our hearts, which makes us open still further — to everything. But it’s a nothingness that fills us, an acceptance of the insignificant. It is one thing to begin our haiku by noting. But it is quite another to move beyond merely noting to making our haiku celebrate nothing. Add an “h” (for haiku) and noting can become nothing. As John Mellancamp said in titling his fourth studio album, “Nothin’ matters and what if it did?” Or as John Cage once said, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.”

These hills
have nothing to say
and go on saying it 

Ken H. Jones, Blithe Spirit 9:1, March 1999

afternoon heat
there is nothing to do
and I’m doing it 

Michael Ketchek, Bottle Rockets #24, 2011, 12

The golden maples:
saying things that can’t be said,
by not saying them.

Nicholas Virgillio, American Haiku, II:1, 1964

There is nothing to be said
about Mount Fuji, so
I have said it.

James Kirkup, Blue Bamboo, Hub Editions, 1993, 49

This nothingness, which is everythingness, fills our hearts. As poet Mark Doty said, “The heart is a repository of vanished things.”

Again, haiku embraces ephemerality, the insignificant, and thus, paradoxically, it embraces the infinite. We have all heard that a cup or bowl is useful only because of the space inside it. Perhaps we can come to understand that this space is not emptiness but a kind of fullness.
Likewise, the beginner’s mind, which we like to think of as empty, is actually completely full, but in the sense of being completely open, the way every cup is full of potential.

the river —
coming to it with nothing
in my hands 

Leatrice Lifshitz, Frogpond 19:3, December 1996, 46

“I hold up what I know with what I do not know.” (97)

We might easily think of “holding up” here to mean to elevate or celebrate. But we could also take it to mean inhibit. Indeed, what we do not know inhibits what we do know. Yet how does stopping at what we know inhibit us, in haiku and beyond? Many scientists have said that their ever-expanding learning, though they learn so much, merely shows them how much they do not know.
Or as Will Durant put it, “Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.” This is what it means to explore the infinite, to recognize the gnat-ness of our lives. This idea can apply to haiku in two ways. One is that we may know a few techniques for haiku, but what little we know may well inhibit us. An example is someone who believes that counting 5-7-5 syllables is all there is to haiku. Such a person, it would seem, is “held up” by what little he or she does know, which seems unfortunate. But Porchia is suggesting the opposite, and it may well be self-evident — that we are held up by what we do not know. Yet beyond Porchia’s claim, even after we learn much more, might we still be “held up” by the more that we know? Just as we can be inhibited by what we do not know, might we remain endlessly inhibited by what we do know?

Thus we can be reminded of beginner’s mind, the nothingness that haiku welcomes, and that welcomes haiku. Meanwhile, there I go saying that the syllable-counter’s road is a wrong road, but the admonition to move beyond paint-by-numbers haiku will lead to deeper mastery, if I get out of the way after raising the question. Yet a larger point remains that whatever we “master” can still inhibit us. As Shunryu Suzuki put it in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” The second way Porchia’s observation applies to haiku is not in terms of haiku craft but haiku spirit. I hesitate to use the term “haiku spirit” when it is so easily thought of in idealized and precious ways. But something behind haiku drives this poetry forward, and drives its practitioners forward, that elusive something that the masters sought. At any moment, we do not know what we do not know, yet as we learn we may see what we didn’t know before, and that realization may instill in us a kind of humility that makes us open to more learning. It brings us to a point, I think, where the full heart has room for everything.

No sound, no movement — 
nothing out there in the night . . .
yet the somethingness . . .
Foster Jewell, American Haiku 6:2, May 1968

“He who has made a thousand things and he who has made none, both feel the same desire: to make something.” (103)

This is the passion of haiku, to make something — even if it’s about nothing. And if the passion remains, we still want to make something even if we’ve already made a thousand. This is how process can matter more than product. The conscientious poet does not ignore product, polishing and refining his or her poetry to push it out the door, but the passion remains in the process, of always wanting to make more. It’s like that old Doritos tortilla chip slogan: “Crunch all you want — we’ll make more.”

“The virtues of a thing do not come from it: they go to it.” (105)

We may like to think of haiku as having many virtues, but it’s surely what we bring to haiku that may or may not give it any virtue. And those virtues may vary for different poets, at times being literary, at times being self expression, therapy, diary records, or amusement. Each stance has its place. As readers of haiku, too, it may well be our responsibility to find the poet’s virtues, and not just assume our own virtues will be what give another writer’s haiku their value. As readers, we need to go to the poem, and not always expect the poem to come to us.

“In the eternal dream, eternity is the same as an instant. Maybe I will come back in an instant.” (115)

Chuang Tzu wondered if he was dreaming he was a butterfly, or if he was a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu. We may never know the truth. And what is truth? Likewise, what is time? Time keeps everything from happening all at once. But to think about this another way, if the here and now is the same as eternity, perhaps everything is happening all at once. Eternity is an instant, whether we come back or not, as Porchia speculates—but perhaps we don’t need to come back because we are already part of eternity. Likewise, if the universe is infinite in all directions, there can be no center—or everywhere is the center. All this theorizing may seem remote from haiku, but if we remember that haiku captures not just an instant but eternity—that haiku is a means of approaching infinity—it may humble us in choosing to write about the everyday and the ordinary.

about 100 billion galaxies I’m about nothing 
Dietmar Tauchner, Noise of Our Origin, Red Moon Press, 2013

“Everything is nothing, but afterwards. After having suffered everything.” (119)

Note the reference to “afterwards” — like Wordsworth’s sense of poetry being powerful emotion recollected in tranquility. But there’s more to learn here. Antonio Porchia’s aphorisms repeatedly speak of life as suffering and of his acceptance of this suffering. They also speak of life as nothing but also of his acceptance of this nothing. In this way, everything is not only nothing, but nothing is everything — and human life reaches both everything and nothing through inevitable suf f ering. As Antonio Porchia says near the beginning of his book, “I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings,” adding that “the soul that cures its own sufferings dies” (13). This echoes with the thought from the same page that “Nothing that is complete breathes.” Life is suffering, or dukkha, as we may know from Buddhist scripture. Or, as we may know from our own personal experience, life is hard, and then we die. Haiku, in seeking nothing, speaks of nothing. In this way, haiku is poetry about nothing, but also about everything. Balance, wholeness, suchness. An acceptance of suffering. Much ado about nothing. The inevitable, beautiful everything. Haiku are poems about nothing.

carrying on
as if nothing had happened
dogwood in bloom 

Carolyne Rohrig, Daily Haiku, November 16, 2010

Works Cited

Hirata, Masaharu, ed. Haiku Friends Volume 2. Osaka, Japan: Umeda Printing Factory, 2007.
Hoftman, Yoel. Japanese Death Poems. Rutland VT: Tuttle, 1986.
Porchia, Antonio. W. S. Merwin, trans. Voices. Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2003.

Source
JUXTAFIVE
The Haiku Foundation