The Three Baskets (2000), The Three Baskets

   
One

Those pastoral moments of orderliness!
The past is put within a basket,
the present lies within the second while the future’s in the last:
these are three baskets into which
the human scatters his existence
that has been poured upon his head.
His body limited in three dimensions
accordingly imposes them on time,
while reason argues loudly in a way,
that these dimensions seem to be reality
and not to have been just created to
sustain the equilibrium between
the physical and the spiritual halves.

One invents the past
and puts there all impossible attempts,
endeavours doomed and finished bodies.
The past commandingly
beguiles towards itself just like a chasm
whose emptiness beguiles towards its bottom
the one who stands upon its ledge.

The present wears the woeful face of clown.
It’s his attempt to enter last and stepping on the stage
to say his final words – the time to make the balance,
the place where reason is confronted with existence
for a last decisive battle. But
the audience refuses to acclaim those tedious
and half-forgotten jokes. It turns
that there’s no circus, no arena,
no zebras neither elephants at all.
It also turns
that there’s no audience but for the clown who speaks before his face.
The present is the human’s conscientious effort
to join the universal cosmic order.

The basket coming last – the future –
is woven on the very base of air
from twisted twigs that fall apart. It is
the anguishes of love that cannot be requited:
the human craves affection
and puts on canvass with his heart
portrayals of a mutual feeling but
this passion will not be requited
for neither does he know the thing that he desires
nor does it know the one who longs for it. And what remains
is just a parching sorrow.

The time of the human:
there stands the never clearer now
between the passed, forever gone beyond recall,
and the yet unfulfilled uncertainties at hand.

But time is not
a salvage bridgehead in the human’s head,
it’s not the well-known vast expanse
that he himself invents to measure it.
Time isn’t now, it’s not before,
it isn’t even after, time is
the occurring of the spirit,
the shade which follows the existence
and casts its shadows over it. It is
the unperceived stairwell which
the existence crosses over
from one intensity towards the other,
pushed ever further by the acts of the spirit.
If they did not exist at all,
time wouldn’t dwindle
nor would it stop, but it’s through them that
its pulling force and its acceleration tend to grow.
You cannot take away from it,
but you can only put within:
so the rivers
flow into the sea, its waters to increase,
but they remain forever nameless.
All the signs upon the sky are to be found
in time and all at once as well as
all at once within the never coming moment
is their absence.

But who
knows all of this?

tr. by Peyo Karpuzov