Haunted

We continue to add these petty pretty details to this house that we've been building for so long. It's almost done now. Even the last coat of paint is dry. Most of the workers have packed up their tools and have gone home. We've entirely forgotten to step back from these petty pretty details to which we devote so much time and energy and regard the entire house. If we were to step back, we'de see that this mansion is really a horrific haunted house. These details we've been adding are nothing but spattered blood and with every brush stroke, every song, poem, story, picture or film - or even every action- we make we kill ourselves more and more. We are creating spectres of ourselves, we are haunting this mansion we've made by destroying every scrap of humanity left within us by adding to its overlayden walls with our own blood. We are creating our own demise, we are creating horrific images of ourselves- phantasms. With the climax of this banshee moan our destruction will rush in like the wind through every door and window, slit and crack in the wall. Then with a great shake, a great spectacle of light and sound we will topple this mansion to the ground and nothing will be left. This is the state of our society. The horror grows daily.

More Doors Opened

I must begin this post by giving the majority of the credit for the ideas herein expressed to my introspective friend who for some reason or other decides to remain silent, yet has indeed profoundingly influenced most of the writing that I have done over the past several months.

I discovered yesterday the identity of the missed call which for some reason or other spurred me to write a post which I find brings together a lot of the thoughts that have been flying around in my head of late. It was a call from a friend who was driving down the road and was suddenly gripped with such an intense realisation that he simply had to write it down lest the moment slip away. He was entirely unable to pull over so he decided to phone me so that I could write down all that he was understanding in the moment. Of course, I failed to pick up the phone and the notion dissolved from his mind before he was able to turn it into language on a page. This is in-an-of-itself a perfect illustration of missed opportunities and thoughts that will never be remembered, yet there is a second layer to the story which makes it all the more intruiging.

From the scattered fragments that my friend was able to convey to me, those pieces of the image which remained after the moment had passed and with it the coherent thought, I was able to see that much of what he had realised was very much alike to what I written in my latest post. His thought had come to him as he saw the lights of a car flicker just as I had seen the streetlights flicker on, he had seen a shift in reality in an instant, and that shift opened up a window through which he was able to see something clearly rather than the usual obfuscated reality we find ourselves in. This is where the Irishman's thoughts are being used. As I explained this occurance to him he commented that it was almost as though the thought which had been lost by my friend had transferred to me. His idea had not been forgotten; it had merely lept through space and time to trigger a process of remembering and coherence in my mind.

There are a great many mysteries in this world, but the enigmatic connections between friends are the most interesting to me. I am moving to Tofino in a few days, something I desperately need to do, but not without regrets. Even though I have not left yet I already miss the people whom I would otherwise be able to share life with here in Surrey. I am caught by my need to leave, yet now that I am leaving I feel as if I should stay. Should I stay or should I go now...I don't think that I will ever look down on the lyrics of The Clash ever again...I've always hated that song, but I am beginning to undestand some of the subtle nuances therein. I thought that the singer should obviously choose the decision which does not cause the double trouble, yet perhaps it is not the relative level of dispair that the singer is getting at. Perhaps he is commenting that no matter what choice one makes it necessarily precludes other possibilities. This is truly part of what tragedy is, to be damned no matter what one does, not because of optimal and suboptimal options, but because of that nagging question, which lurks everywhere. Lurks from the bright lights of a stage to an empty bottle to the twisted metal of a car crash. That haunting question heard from the lips of madmen, visionaries and the wind, what if?

That last paragraph has little to do with what my introspective friend said to me, but really it is the interaction of what he said to me that allowed me to continue on with the thought. It makes more sense to me now why so many writers and musicians spend such a great deal of their time thanking the people around them who in some way or other contributed to the creation of a coherent image, their art. Just as my post was a subliminally transferred notion across a city, so the conversations I have with other people help to construct and build the ideas which I then write down. I realized this a few days ago as I was speaking with a poet friend of mine with whom I love to hold discourse with, but it is very clear that we have almost completely oppossing views, although we are similar in some very important ways as well. I can always be assured that when I speak to a poet my words will be remembered and somehow given life through another pen than my own. In the same way those who speak to me and share their perspective with me can always have the hope that at least one person has listened to, interpreted, interacted with and tried to express who they are. It is in this way that we might possibly be able to find ourselves, in the responses of those who are listening to us.

End of an Era

I am always put out of sorts when I miss a call on my cell phone. I will enter a room to find my expectant cellphone cheerfully and alarmingly informing me that I have missed a call, yet due to my technological ineptitude there is no call display to show me who had been so sorely disappointed to have missed me. Their identity is usually forever lost to me. Perhaps I am disturbed because I am entirely insecure and neurotic and am therefore emotionally devastated by the loss of a possible social excursion, or even a conversation with another human being. Yet, that indeed is it, it is the conversation! That chance communication with another being, lost by my absent mind-edness, that hope of connection with another being, that joke of a detatched engagement over a telephone signal. That missed call did not only represent a possible vacuous social enagement, but the possibility of one of those golden moments, one of those times that a friend needed to talk, and for some reason you dropped everything and went for a walk, went for a walk and talked, and together approached something which might actually be called a real experience of life.

Today as I was driving down the road in the early evening my eye caught the streetlights as they flickered on. In that split second I realised that I had just missed the flash of the dusk. I had missed that moment at which some city planners deemed the natural light to be at such a level that streetlights were necessary and that night should begin. During that flash, during that minute instance of dusk, I may have seen it, experienced it, but by the time the light had travelled to my eyes and I was able to process the stimuli in my mind it was gone. I've said it before, the dusk is something that cannot be seen nor comprehended easily. Yet, there is no point in writing, or even thinking about nostalgia because it will always come back to haunt you.

This theme of missed opportunities has been continually recurring in my mind today and for the majority of my life. A rather spontaneous friend of mine recently convinced me to move to Tofino where he has been living this summer, something I should have done 2 months ago. Instead I have been sitting around my suburb wishing that I was somewhere else, somewhere other than the blase tedium of the suburbs. I live too much in regret. I feel as if life has not yet begun because I am perpetually looking back. That is what I do, I am an historian, more to the point I am a human being, whose very existence is dependent upon the capacity to reflect and interpret the past. It is often said that he who forgets his past is doomed to repeat it, yet I have begun to see recently that the inverse is also true. The reason for looking back to the past is to learn how to forget that which we are looking at, let it recede into phantasmatic oblivion and allow oneself to drift on, unimpeded into the blazing glory of the infinite nonexistent yet eternal futures.

What was it about a missed cellphone call that made me think of this, to put together four thoughts from throughout today that I had thought I had forgotten. Irony indeed! Again, it is the possibilities incurred by the enigmatic caller. It makes me ponder what inumerable paths my life could have taken and could still take, what conversations I could have had, had and could have, people I could meet, faces that I might someday vaguely and hauntingly recognise. I will quote an introspective friend of mine to end my thoughts, "we don't know where we are, but we know HOW to get out of here." I don't know where I am going in this life, or even where I am, but I am confident that I know how to deal with that. Rather than fabricate a roadmap or religion, a purpose or a reason for any of this divine siezure that we call existence I possess the capacity to actually embrace all of it, the good and the bad, the dark and the light, the depressed and the manic... I have no need for trite answers or solutions, or even sight to see where it is that I am going, I just need to go...

Birthday Precious

A strange thing indeed it is to have something new in one's possession. This thing, this machination of inumerable complexities that even to look at the outer shell of its being is entirely incomprehensible to me. To not be and then suddenly to be is truly terrifying, like being born, as I was 21 years ago today. That is in and of itself a mystery to me. The other mystery being this me fellow who seems to think that he is worth while enough to type on this fringe of a typing implement. Where this being goes is more interesting than who he is. Who cares what colour an object is, an arrow is boring, I would rather witness it hit the target. Impact is interesting, not the detailed rigormaroo which superfluates the literary world. This is why I am unable to write narrative, or perhaps I am creating a new idea of what narrative is. I am not interested in the process, I care about what it will accomplish and where it came from. I have a tendency to cut off the beginnings and ends of my sentances, I know the middle, so I care precious little for it. I want to see the beginning and end. Those two moments which we are robbed of by reality. Since it is impossible to be conscious at one's birth, since even an old soul is unable to understand the new stimuli of a newly born child. The end is where we must seek the truth, that moment of death. "This is the end" spoke the wise prophet...I or we rather, are looking for the end. The problem with our physical reality is that we forget that we are not looking for the end, but rather the beginning, that experience we are excluded from remembering. We are looking for a birth that we can never have again, and since the momory is lost we never really experienced in the first place. We spend our lives looking for the end goal, but all we really find is our continual yet elusive beginning. And so I type on my birthday, that I am growing older, today I am 21 and my liver just turned 40. I must become a child again and truly smirk the smile which would allow me to jump off the edge as if my hands were always being held by come ineffable force beyond anything I could ever imagine.

Some Wandering Thoughts

It is not the wilderness that I desire, but the safety of hidden oases in the obscure corners of our steel and concrete prison. Those spots that no one notices because they are scuttling along too busy to see. Those spots where tree and grass and water and bird and flower thrive despite the pollution which surrounds them. To be in the system , yet melting its innards, eating it apart from the inside out, like ants carving a new kingdom out of a long dead tree.

I cannot wander, unheimlichen, without a goal or a home.
Even an arrow has a target.
There can be no peace or purpose without an end.
The mortal cannot hope to experience immortality.
Yet, in that is the answer, a mortal cannot hope,
but a mortal can merely do it.
Stop worrying about the future and live in the moment.

I don't think that it is possible for me to wander alone. For all the impossibilities of complete communication the mere presense of what may or may not be another person is enough to give my wandering a different element. There is a deeper texture to wandering with another; a texture which fades when I am alone. To wander slowly, saying little, focused on the rocks below your feet, yet forgetting them all as you move on, with a person of a like wander-prone soul gives more satisfaction than a vaste store of meaningless aquaintances.