CHILD
HADY BEYDOUN 2004

So what is life?
I hear many people, older people, say that life is empty. They say that there is nothing more to life than a family and children. For them this is the only meaningful thing in life: children. A wife occasionally, but they all say that life smiles for them through the smile of their own child. I find that redundant and hard to believe. I see that only as a lame excuse for a miserable state of life: Survival. When all ambition is drenched by the naggings of a wife and living with the mistakes of a past. They call it life. I call that merely survival. Living day by day and exalting only the simplest of pleasures, making a big deal out of the tiniest things, holding on to the trivial....

Life, for me is much more than just sitting with a bunch of friends wasting time by telling jokes and hitting on a girl. I see things from a slightly different perspective. Life for me is achievement. Making one's self better, higher, faster, stronger.... and they scream back at me: For what for what all that selfish greed of yours! You will die like the rest of us! Sure I will my dear, but before I do, I will excel! But you will not take anything with you! True I will not take anything material with me when I die, but I will certainly take the knowledge of my achievement, and the satisfaction of it, the contentment, the fulfillment, the satisfaction and the pride of having achieved as much. Yes that is what makes me a happy man and my life worth living. Cockroaches and low lives produce children and are swallowed by families and kin. Mosquitoes give birth to thousands of hatchlings every season and humankind is begetting more and more children everyday, so how can this act of getting a child be the climax of one's own life? The achievement of so and so's lifetime is this crying parasite of a child! How commendable! How unique! You are able to achieve bringing a child to this world! Wow! What an Achievement!

This is not the climax of one's own life! This is pathetic. Begetting a child is not the purpose of life but the most reason empty-lived people give to themselves in order to find some meaning for their existence to go on! So they have a purpose! Another hungry mouth to feed, and another burden to nag about, so they can feel important. So they can have a purpose to live and go on. Otherwise they will end up leading empty and boring lives, aimless, purposeless and vain.

What then is the higher purpose in life? It is achieving the self, and exceeding even that. There is no fountain of youth or any hidden treasure, but maybe there is: In the within and only there. To live for the self, is to be happy. It is to Live. To be Alive. To Breath the air and to feel the sun. To be driven by a goal, to an end. The end does not justify the means, but the means do justify the end!

Live to work? But what work? What slavery are you talking about? Missing life? Do you think that by me working the whole day and night and painting and reading and writing and dreaming and doing what I do, do you think this is work for me? Do you think it is slavery to create? Slavery is in the redundant routine of your life, not in mine. Mine is pure and happy and real, not fake and unpleasant and dedicated to your boss. I am the means and the end in my own self therefore I am closer to being complete than you will ever be. You have no chance in even understanding what I write, I write it for me.

I could write for you too, but how true about me would they be? Things I write are things I think about.

ON YOUR TIME
HADY BEYDOUN 1999

Isolated in a world of illusion
Paint and color and money
Friends and love and sexuality
Lies and destiny

What is with this illusion of reality that grasps me from the inside? Making days look like a flat color in a grey painting? What of the desire to be paranoid and insane? The desire to grasp the core to scratch the surface and rip it open.... to know more and to die with every action.

The days pass like in a dream and greatness grows even greater still. The desire to grow more from the deep and to touch the bottom so real. To lie with every breath and to cheat. To cheat what?

To eat and to drink with it, to lie and to deceive.... but the answers lies within? What answer? The answer to what question>? The need to be a freak. To touch and hold the light. The icicle between the eyes. To sink deep beneath the well of dreams. To see clear. To drink the water so sweet and to sink deep beneath the surface. To be alone. To forget and to relive the memories of the past and the dreams. To be insane. To be unclear. To be certain that in this well lies a torment desired to be. That sweet torment which lets me be. To create that torment and to let it be. To let it engulf me entirely. To let it make me be and see and feel and live. To let it set me free!

Free on your time or mine>?
Yours and mine it seems to be, for your time is linked with mine, for I have let you in. And the more you stay with me, the deeper you sink and the more you feel. The more you feel the need to be me. To be me. To be me. What is it like to be me? I have no clue!

I desire to be free, to be me and to be sad. To be in a constant struggle. To die and to live everyday. To be a freak. To be twisted and insincere. To be a liar and to be insane. To be passionate and to be sincere. To be a contrast, to be wise and unclear. To be abnormal. To be different, insane, neurotic and a paranoid. To be unsafe and sweet. To be a contrast between what I want and what I dread so much. What do I dread?

What do I dread? I dread to be me. To be safe. To be clear and sincere. I dread to fear. I fear not and I do fear still. So many things I do fear and so many things I do see so clear. So many things I provoke. So many things I make loud and clear. So many things I want to break. To break and to lead. To be good and to feel. To feel time slip and to make use of a youth gone wild. Is it gone wild?

Is my youth gone wild or plainly insincere?
My youth is painted in colors and dreams. So poetic as this may seem but so twisted I know it is. Still my youth has nit ended and I know it with no fear.

Oh sweet melancholy...
Where did I get this? Music... so passionate and so aggressive as it may seem. I want to touch myself deep within. To see the ugly me. To revel in t he mystery of being me. Am I a mystery yet unseen by myself even still?

Am I so sweet and so neat>? Do I need to write this down thinking and knowing that one day you may be reading this and analyzing me>? Do I think I am that great?

Maybe

So what is it then?
Sickness, depression, fear, cowardice, anger...? All of these or none of the above?
Passion distorted, contorted, amplified.

How to describe the state that I am in? A state of confusion and pain, a state of too many questions and too much noise. A state of fear of change brought about by stronger factors. A guiding hand? Is the guiding hand only there when in moments of pleasure? Is the guiding hand only a guiding hand when we are guided to an instant reward by being guided into what we in the immediate need?

The guiding hand directs our ways or so we tend to believe. It makes us decide on things, take action. Mainly we only feel the guiding hand's presence when we take action in things that we normally would not do. Making us do more daring things, bolder things, crazier things. Crazier by our own understanding of things and vision in life. What do we call that? Sometimes we call it sacrifice, depending on the situation and sometimes we call it plain crazy or bold.

We strive to become better people by dying to our senses. By setting ourselves in a motion that goes uphill for us. A motion that is harder to attain. One that consumes too much effort from out part. One that is the most selfish.

THE IRON PEOPLE
HADY BEYDOUN 2004

What happens to iron people when they grow older?
They get humbled down
Why? What do you mean?
I see them losing their solidity somehow they look weaker, look equal at you and not in the eye anymore. They become more liquid it seems. Their arrogance gone.
Is it because they grew older or because I grew bigger?
Is it because they gave up?
I wonder if the same will happen to me, or maybe not
Can I like my self and life if I get humbled down?
Now I say no
Of course not, it is all I have, my arrogance and many things to back it up.
Can I be a god?
Am I a god?
I act like one somehow, I feel strong, determined and so solid
I feel unbreakable, decisive and ready to act
Am I like that?
Really? Yes, I was always like that.
Am I still like that? Oh yes, I feel solid enough to say it.
Do I crave achievement?
Yes with pleasure.
Am I the one?
I am no doubt.

The torture of a mind, and the blessing of a desire, the desire to be, along with the anguish of solitude. Surrounded by a multitude of pain and torture, silence be quiets all other colors. Louder than pain, solitude screams for more, and the torture of a mind, in a home never secure. A man alone in the face of the wind, rises so high, over a plain of blades, green and numerous, that for him, it were just a dream... An awareness of the self, one which is so intense, and so profound, a sector of a life, that which diminishes all ability to communicate and give birth to intimacy...Love denied and the lust to achieve overridden by a melancholy and a pain so ironic that all values have been reduced to a mere memory of time...The objectivity of this text stems from the denial of a pleasure, and the admittance of a weakness.... this text talks about the self, one which is the source of all the pain and achievement. Insatiable personality, and the lust to fly.

The flight of the soul and its ascend to a lore more mythical and intensely profound ends up in a desire and a desperation. The belief now reduced to a mere thought, and a memory...so strong it had been, until after some flight, the weight of the fall shed light unto the plain reality. And the delusion that of a sacrifice, unemotional, and immaterial, that one of the intimacy one feels in their own home...one which has for so long never been felt, and lived. The sweat and the pain, and the false joy, and the blades, all amount to a precious time being wasted, or to a different time, where passion has no more place.