Final Day, Act One

A seraph approached me last night
Gave me a burning letter and flew away blazing
As I broke the wax stamp a black phoenix fluttered before me
It took me to the fractal spiral and shattered my body
And with it all of my self-proclaimed sins
The eternity that is to be was one and I was told that
There is nothing to regret and there will never be
If I should go through this scabrous wildwood again
I would, just to live again that night when we met at the cemetery
The bird sent me back to believe that there is nothing to regret
Aye, there is nothing to regret


























When the time comes for gentlemen Their ethics to deprave
I’ll be standing in front of my children’s grave
I’ll be asking with a brain gone illogically brave
Where is my promised final day
That has been taken from the grievous away
Who will kindly grant it to me
Where are the pages of Genesis Lost
And who will pay the cost
Where is my promised final day
That has been taken from the grievous away
Who will kindly grant it to me
Where are the pages of Genesis Lost
And who will pay the cost
Better than my noose in the company of I to be tossed
I to be tossed
Who will kindly stand in front of me and say
"There is still a cigarette to finish in the ashtray."

Inverted Pyramid

Back when I spent a year of my life as a full-time volunteer, during our initial meeting in the organization I was working for, we – the volunteers – were entertained with a peculiar world view, which was given to us as an insight to how the organization works. This theory had no name, nor specific details. It was just a basic outline of a simple idea. I keep thinking about it since, and today I would like to share it with You. My version might have a bit more of an in-depth shape in order to deliver its message in a (hopefully) more applicable manner, but its main proposal remains the very same. I have given the concept the name "Inverted Pyramid", which task was not hard to achieve, as You will soon see. It is not to be confused with the metaphor used by journalists.

Before we get to it, I would like to share some background information on it. Mainly, the Inverted Pyramid is a theoretic socio-organizational structure and an outline for functional behavior. A structure such as this can benefit us greatly. Some of You have undoubtedly heard of many scientific works pointing to the increasing troubles we, as a collective, have. These troubles are among the most significant we have ever had, and their weight might just be superseding all poverty, wars and ruthlessness combined. On this blog, I already mentioned two scientific explorations of these dangers: the one about a modeling of societal collapse, and one which was a warning to humanity back in '92. I am now also drawing attention to a recent one, which reminds us about the necessity of bringing change to the paradigm of our worldwide system. This need is not a mere idealistic, new-age dream, as many people tend to write it off: we either do it or the society as we know it perishes anyway.

Instead of waking us up to our senses, all these mentioned forecasts are mostly bringing out the pessimists in us. I meet so many people who are at least vaguely aware of how deep we sunk in troubles, but I can count on one hand how many of them actually have a positive attitude towards our prospect. When I ask how we should proceed to successfully respond to these challenges, the answers I usually get go along the lines of "we ought to die anyway" or "there's nothing to be done". These defeatist views are not present because all people are inherently fatalistic. It is because we are not used to thinking far outside of our daily concerns and are bombarded with useless information all the time.

A Malevolent Defect

Up until now, I intentionally avoided writing about the current immigrant situation in Europe. My reason for this is that there are many people with a much better insight into the topic than me, who are actively discussing and acting upon the affair. Adding my own opinion just seems redundant. Be that as it may, it happened so that today two similar online projects were called to my attention; one being done in the Slovenian, the other in the Croatian language. These projects are focused on a certain aspect of the whole immigrant issue in their respective countries, both of which's languages I speak. And this certain aspect I always found to be the most alarming of all. Its scope surpasses the concerns around the immigrants. The circumstances in progress purely demonstrate a fertile ground for observing this phenomenon well, and these two websites provide an excellent viewpoint. Thus, I decided to write an exclusive blog post, sharing the message of these websites, in English.

Paranimalia: Deer Witch

If it wasn't obvious by now: I love writing. This pleasure exceeds the pages of Asylum for Thoughts. One of my ongoing writing projects is entitled Paranimalia. As I see it now, it will contain short stories, all of which tell tales by forging motives of animals and mythological creatures into the fabric of the wording, but with a specific twist each. The animals will never be directly depicted as They are usually imagined. Rather, Their symbols are to be used as stepping stones for hopefully enjoyable plots.

Until recently, I thought of these series as a project only to be publicized once it is finished. I changed my mind. In order to one day finish the whole collection, I'm proceeding in smaller steps. A neat element to this approach is that I can also tell the story of each story (i.e. what inspired me, and how the writing evolved until its ripeness). These descriptions will follow after each of the texts.

Dear Reader, I present You the first narrative of Paranimalia I penned, the: Deer Witch.

The Extraterrestrial Paradigm

When humanity began mindfully observing patterns during our development, it was only natural to one night look up at the sparkling sky and dream up constellations. It's not far-fetched to think that the stars shaped our lives according to when and where they appeared, and what we thought of them. Trying to solve the meaning of life, we brewed many inquiries about the nature of what may spread far above the deep azure. For many of those we discovered solutions and thus achieved progress; yet there are a few we never got around figuring out. Belonging to the latter category, one of our greatest unanswered questions can be paraphrased in many ways: are we on this planet, as a semi-conscious group, alone in the Universe? Are there other species in outer space, who pose Themselves with the same intrigue? Is life common throughout the Cosmos?

Given the recent discovery on Mars, we might find (traces of) life on the Red Planet. What mostly interests the common human, however, is not mere life that is outside of our planetary ecosystem, but life that has organized itself into some form of civilization or a comparable structure of sentience. A contact with such being(s) would prove to be one of the, if not the, most important events to take place in humanity's history.

The father of nuclear power, Enrico Fermi, had proposed His famous question "Where is everybody?", which gave birth to the famed Fermi Paradox. In short, this apparent paradox questions the puzzling clash of the relatively high likelihood of interstellar contact between developed beings, with the fact that we haven't experienced such a contact. Some decade later Frank Drake, a pioneer in extraterrestrial life research, came up with the Drake Equation, a probabilistic formula for estimating the number of other intelligent life capable of interstellar communication within the Milky Way. Its usefulness had been criticized many times over, although if it has at least some validity, then there should be at least two other such civilizations in our galaxy, regarding the latest estimates (valid during the time of writing this blog post).

So far we haven't noticed anyone. My expectation is that meeting any kind of intelligent extraterrestrial life with our current and estimated future capabilities is left to a pure twist of fate, since the scale of different barriers leaves us stranded between passion and unlikelihood. Some readers might find this post biased because of this conviction of mine – however I do assure You that it comes from the most eager of attempts in understanding the topic as much as an enthusiast can. To counter the effects of my doubt, I'm also presenting views that speak in favor of interstellar contact. In-depth descriptions of the most popular and related topics have been written by many other thinkers, so I encourage You, Reader, to broaden Your knowledge by bravely searching the vast Web. Furthermore, in this post I'm avoiding anything that might resemble conspiracy or any similar sighting theories. I am in strong disbelief towards such topics, but I'm in no position to fruitlessly argue against them, so let's just leave them at this.