Bill Janssen

“The will to inflict pain arises often out of a misplaced desire for empathy and so represents a rather pure gesture of affection.”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“He paused as his eyes went Elsewhere. His mouth hung open uncharacteristically in an odd moment of hesitation.

But then he spoke: “I dreamt one night that I stood before the Conjurer of All. I do not know if this Conjurer was God, per se , but let us entertain the possibility that there exists, at least encoded in the patterned mechanisms of the human mind, a necessary and indelible embodiment therein that is simultaneously the Creator of the Universe and the Forger of All Things Within It The Knower of All there is to Know, to say the least. I stood uncomfortably before such an entity and this Conjurer spoke thus, ‘Seeker of Truth!’ His words were oppressive, yet assuring, ‘Now it can all be told! Now you may have all the answers you seek. All the answers of the Universe!’ This proclamation only satisfied me briefly, for I almost immediately found myself responding, ‘Dear Conjurer, I do not wish to sound ungrateful, but instead of all the answers, may I not have more
questions? An endless supply even? For all else would seem insufficient. I could never face a world that lacked mystery.’ The Maker laughed as though I had told the only joke in the Universe in which he could find humor. I awoke immediately, out of breath, for I, too, had been laughing.”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“Ask me any question–preferably one with no simple answer. Or one with no answer at all–even better. Just ask, and await no answer. Let the question take on a life of its own.”
― Ashim Shanker

“Between concentric pavement ripples glide errant echoes originating from beyond the Puddled Metropolis. Windowless blocks and pickle-shaped monuments demarcate the boundaries of patternistic cycles from those wilds kissed neither by starlight nor moonlight. Lethal underbrush of razor-like excrescence pierces at the skins of night, crawls with hyperactive sprouts and verminous vines that howl with contempt for the wicked fortunes of Marshland Organizers armed with scythes and hoes and flaming torches who have only succeeded in crafting their own folly where once stood something of glorious and generous integrity. There are familiar whispers under leaves perched upon by flapping moths. They implore the spirit again to heed the warnings of the vines and to not be swayed by the hubris of these organizing opportunists. One is to stop moving at frantic zigzags through gridlocked streets, stop climbing ladders altogether, stop relying on drainage pipes where floods should prevail, stop tapping one’s feet in waiting rooms expecting to be seen and examined and acknowledged. Rather, one is to eschew unseemly fabrications and conceal oneself beneath the surface of leaves—perhaps even inside the droplets of dew—one is, after all, to feel shameful of the form, of all forms, and seek instead to merge with whispers which do not shun or excoriate, for they are otherwise occupied in the act of designating meaning. Yet, what meaning stands beyond the rectitude of angles and symmetry, but rather in wilds among agitated insects and resplendent bogs and malicious spiders and rippling mosses pronouncing doom upon their surroundings? One is said to find only the same degree of opportunism, and nothing greatly edifying that could serve to extend beyond the banalities of self-preservation. But no, surely there is something more than this—there absolutely must be something more, and it is to be found! Forget what is said about ‘opportunism’—this is just a word and, thusly, a distraction. The key issue is that there are many such campaigns of contrivance mounted by the taxonomic self-interest of categories and frameworks ‘who’ only seek primacy and authority over their consumers. The ascription of ‘this’ may thusly be ascribed also with that of ‘this other’ and so it cannot be ‘that precisely’ because ‘this’ contradicts another ‘that other’ with which ‘this other’ surely claims affiliation. Certainly, in view of such limiting factors, there is a frustration that one is bound to feel that the answers available are constrained and formulaic and insufficient and that one is simply to accept the way of things as though they are defined by the highest of mathematics and do not beget anything higher. One is, thusly, to cease in one’s quest for unexplored possibility. The lines have been drawn, the contradictions defined and so one cannot expect to go very far with these mathematical rules and boundaries in place. There are ways out: one might assume the value of an imaginary unit and bounce out of any restrictive quadrant as with the errant echoes against the rippling pavement of this Puddled Metropolis. One will then experience something akin to a bounding and rebounding leap—iterative, but with all subleaps constituting a more sweeping trajectory—outward to other landscapes and null landscapes, inward through corridors and toward the centroid of circumcentric chamber clusters, into crevices and trenches between paradigms and over those mountain peaks of abstruse calculation.”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward