This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders
Enjoy with Caecilius
When it comes to Amanita, I hold the view that this mushroom is primarily meant to be used in January. It’s the perfect winter booster, containing a truly superior form of Vitamin D2 that you’ll rarely find elsewhere in nature (and in pills? No, that’s an entirely different story).
The theme of this mushroom is Occupy Yourself.
You must understand that the Deer and the Fly Agaric may appear to you as separate entities, but I can assure you that they are not. And I don’t mean this in some mystical sense where everything is ultimately a form of everything else—no. I mean this quite literally, in a magical sense.
Occupy Yourself. Because you are not alone in your mind. Yesterday, I read this beautiful excerpt from Castaneda:
He called the voice of seeing a most mysterious inexplicable thing. “My personal conclusion is that the voice of seeing belongs only to man,” he said. “It may happen because talking is something that no one else besides man does. The old seers believed it was the voice of an overpowering entity intimately related to mankind, a protector of man. The new seers found out that that entity, which they called the mold of man, doesn’t have a voice. The voice of seeing for the new seers is something quite incomprehensible; they say it’s the glow of awareness playing on the Eagle’s emanations as a harpist plays on a harp.”
Those who still wish to see me perform as a poet will have only one remaining opportunity to do so. On February 5, I will give a reading in the library of Mierlo, which will also be my last performance ever. For this country, I no longer wish to be a poet. Under the Applause and Dust of Lights will also be the final poetry collection I will publish in Dutch.
After that, I will leave for an as-yet-unknown destination.
This does not mean I will stop creating—quite the opposite. My podcast show, now available on Spotify, and other projects will continue as usual.
What will not continue is my masochistic attempt to make a difference in the current literary climate of the Netherlands. Some dreams can, over time, begin to stifle.
Frankly, I don’t even know if it was ever truly a dream of mine to be a Poet in the Netherlands. Honestly, I don’t think it was. I can hardly imagine anything more dismal. But I love creating beautiful things, so I will keep doing that. And as Csoóri put it so eloquently in the Pentecost poem that I translated in this collection: congratulations, the talented have won once again.
No, nationalism is not my forte. But with nationalists, our land is overflowing with talents. This isn’t even a uniquely Dutch problem—far from it. All over the world, small minds dominate everything. The modern man, as Nietzsche described, seems to have lost all interest in grandeur or elevation.
There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
That’s what Orwell wrote, and in Gaza, we see that eternal boot in vigorous motion.
It’s not my world. But that’s my fault—or so the system’s sentry would have you believe: he didn’t behave like a poet is supposed to behave.
(They keep silent about such matters or call for a ceasefire. The word genocide is not mentioned.)
I wish you all the best with the next collection, titled Caecilius est in Hortum.
And no, you don’t need to worry about me. Perhaps you should have if I hadn’t found the strength to switch dreams.
Martinus Benders, January 10, 2025