Modern Me in Search of Wholesome Grasp or Grasshoppers Push Pillars and Pilgrims Sport Scars or Pistol Papa, Moon Mama

On this softly burning beauty of love

 

For me the idea has always been to distrust and suspect anything. Everything. Cloak of falsity grows thicker on veins of inside and outside. It’s like a miasma, and the hunt has mostly been illusive, fights have mostly been with mocking shadows. Everything is personal. They decline began ever since I started learning to put weights of worth on stuff, to value stuff with different quantifiers, signifiers and other denominations. As I started to attach values to things, fond memories dwindled. It’s like a progression of inevitability. Childhood was honest. Everything was sunshine and fond birds returning in sunset. At least, most things were.

The most suspicious of all has been my personal sincerity.  It all freezes up. Antennae catch signals they’re programmed to catch. The journey has always been through a set of systems and processes. I haven’t really lived, have we? It’s all about terming a definite set of patterns as living, and servitude to a set of constructs, institutions and beliefs. There’s no other way in this game. Even choices and chances seem pre-directed. And all this is nothing new. The idea of pursuit of novelty, through life and art, is utter bullshit. I’ve approached the idea of newness by learning to tag a set of constructs as ‘new’ and another set as old.

The idea of beauty is an acquired one. I have learned sunsets to be beautiful and hence I find them so. I have been taught that the series and sequences of happenings associated with sunset which lead to the implication that the sun is setting, is beautiful. I have learned to appreciate a set of stuff and find pleasure and happiness in them and call them ‘beautiful’, I have learned to attach the notion of beauty to that set and to attach that set to the acquired notion of beauty. The same applies to ugliness, plenitude, platitude, tedium et cetera and further et cetera. The idea of consciously challenging hegemony is absurd and the metaphor of red rag to bull is absurd and the idea of Ophelia, floating, like a great white lily by the bending willows is absurd. I have looked hard to find a speck of tear or two in the eyes and cheek of Sisyphus. Did I find any?

The pursuit is damning. Demons run amok in burning city, through houses and streets, aflame, and smoke tolling up like vines of dark, ensured crime. Hurt to terrible, formless silence, naked children roam harsh, naked earth for centuries and millennia. I have sought to hear their footsteps echoing along the ancient, haunted forests. Stars, galaxies, constellations and everything else that lies between the hands of clock freeze out before they burn. I’ve been curious and I have bent my head over volcanoes. The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.       

  

On this softly burning love of beauty

The present times and spaces are distal and sonorous. We call it modern. We ask ourselves ‘are you modern?’ or ‘did you become modern enough’? Excuse the plurality, but aren’t we all the mean averages of the rest? Conditions of living are social. Conditioned living is social. I have looked and I have looked hard but I haven’t found any difference between ‘living’ and ‘being alive’. I ask myself ‘Was this much all you wanted?’ and I move on without waiting for any reply. I am too cynical to believe in any answer provided to this, because of the ‘provided’ part. Have I gathered enough provisions?

Living/being alive pushes me beyond values and being here, now, being a conditioned social factor, tries to keep me within values. This tension is inevitable, and is felt in and reflected through what I see and hear and in how I see them and hear them, and the ‘how’ depends entirely on the ‘what’. This reflection manifests itself through so many planes, levels, layers and dimensions that I have stopped finding them funny.

Conscious maintenance of balance between the push and the pull is, to me, a dark prison, guarded by the sharks of love and hate. Binaries make shadows on the walls of the prison cell. Someone, something, maybe a happy memory, a nugget of sunshine, a happy tune or two from long past, or a nice warm dream gives me a sword to attack the shadows, to keep pushing forth. That we move is beyond doubt but I doubt the vectors and the arrows and even the milestones. I have learned the axes as I have been taught to and I doubt all I have learned. Even rabbits learn to shut their eyes to headlights. Or, do they? The thing I doubt most is my personal sincerity. For me, the only fun lies in free fall.            

Living/being alive pushes me to the poverty of gratification. I am lying down. Fan swirls. Smoke from cigarette and ashtray swirls and curls up to the roof, clock ticks through the heart of personal time and history. It’s a continuity. I drag my body through this, and I get pissed, repulsed, weary. Dying is the only fixed point, the only break. Waiting is meek, it stretches only as far as ideals and hopes do. The rest is all about being here, now, and being there, then. Even the amazement of being a stranger fades away and birds return to nest at sunset. Maybe there won’t be anything more since this afternoon or maybe there wasn’t anything more since that afternoon. It’s all about the personal institution standing on /moving through quicksand. The rest is cinema. Or maybe kaleidoscope.

 

On this soft burning of beauty and love

 

At times I feel like I have been banished from that beautiful kingdom of which I have no memory. That was perhaps the other break – between the stage and the actor, where illusion snapped itself from reality and reality snapped itself from illusion and light snapped itself from darkness and darkness snapped itself from light. There can’t be any philosophical cognition to this and I am slowly moving through centuries like a slimy sluggish reptile with cold eyes and cold skin to approach the cognition that cognitions are lies. Maybe that’s a point to hold on to, for a while. In any case, the basic story is pretty much straightforward.  

 

Yes, darling. We who have no wisdom and hence no love, no friends, no faith and earnestness, no big stones with answers written, no conscious effort to arrive at or move away from something or anything, we who have only believed in the constancy of living and dying, rather, in the only true binary of being alive and not being alive – we want to be alive and not be not-alive, we love, we hit out to what we love as that’s the only way we know to show our passion, we hit out through thinking, crying, through crazed laughter and wild fucking, we seek and push on for that bit of picture stuck inside our heads – an image of the moment of being born, of starting to be alive, with our chained hands folded in earnest prayer – they only bit of sincerity, the segment that stands alone, the strongest of all pillars – the only one that’ll survive till it does. The bell that tolled then has been stuck inside since then. Is this one finality?

   

 

Move through the door of doors

Love me once and love me more.

 

On this soft beauty of burning in love

 

 I wake up to find that the lizard has crawled out from behind the wallclock and has stuck its head- neck-breast-belly-tail to the wall. The wall was painted blue once and now it’s a fading daze of blue and the bit of dampness which has made its presence felt on one patch at the corner will soon be death and become death and spread out and spray out all over our body-ridden entirety of life of lizard, wall and the wallclock. Then there’s that huge grey cat sitting at the horizon and contemplating a mouse trapped between its paws. The cat’s head is stooping over the mouse and its nose is very close to the mouse’s brown, hairy back. There’s no telling when the cat will eat the mouse.  Come, let’s have tea and lie down in the coffin, together and draw a picture of something together, pencil in one hand and eraser in the other so that we can put new strokes and rub it off while putting a newer one and keep going at it through our personal spaces and times and without caring about what it will come to be and when the bell will toll and for whom will it toll.   

For me the big fat idea has always been the absorption of all impacts of worths, shapes and postures. I find myself being alive inside the eroding boundaries and wearing a wide variety of masks and making a learned, unconscious effort to hold on to them even when they aren’t needed anymore. Resistance to strangers is pressed in the hardly fathomed depths which are impossible to survey with conscious neutrality. I can be alive outside me. This resistance is often termed, in books, movies and speech, as terror. Do not step on wet cement. Perhaps one day I won’t need the guards anymore. Consciousness, emotions and presentment will all be where the sun rises and moon sets and where the moon rises and sun sets. Sounds clichéd because I have learned about clichés like I have learned about other stuff and putting footnotes to everything kills the fun, but the sources do keep on shifting with the shapes. Catching them is not possible but we often sift through acceptance and rejection in search of codes. The magic-mantra of symmetry is always illusive/elusive. It takes a lot to come to this.

 

And thus, as from hour to hour I rot and rot, the borders between being and not being alive become redundant; Narcissus-story continues, in its lonely-mad-masochist bolt through stars, trams, buses, spectrums, shops, water-lilies, cigarette-butts and diagnosis to join the dots and knots that I have learned to accept, striving for synthesis, assortment and plurality of this one; and of that one.   

 

On this soft love of burning in beauty

 

Move through the blade of blades

Closer to stuff that swayed

Before, and after

they invade.

 

Another twilight, maybe. I see mammoths in that, I see magic-birds flying, huge reptiles crawling to holes in the surface, cavities filling up with waste through bondage, I also see ancient sailors floating to the sad, vast horizon. Or is it their spirits? I can’t say for sure, I haven’t seen their eyes, or the sockets where their eyes should ideally be. When moon goes down, another carnival begins. Yet another haze, miasma that engulfs stoic, static trains in stoic static stations and loco-sheds; galaxies float like severed heads of heroes from ancient, celestial myths and magenta fairy-tales and the darkness is their blood now and the sadness is the mist now, the loneliness is the rain now; I see creatures of dark come out and pray for rain. Actually they don’t but it feels good to feel that they do. Moreover, actually I don’t, but it feels good to feel that I do. Good is what makes me easy and happy. Ease and happiness are what make me feel good.