scruta

Do you want to know what loneliness is? It is an obsession. It is the thing that you know you should turn your eyes from, but you can’t look away. It is a naked woman prancing through the streets flooded with pedestrians, and you are the one driving a tractor trailer behind her, staring idly when you should be watching your mirrors and the road ahead.

Loneliness is that naked woman running through the streets too fast for you to catch her. The more you try the faster she goes, wearing you out, folding your concentration, diverting your attentions.

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Sometimes I think I’ve fallen in love with loneliness. I do not work to end the sight of her. The chase I make across the city late at night or in the brightness of the morning is the same. I love that amber sigh I feel when I meet her gaze, that shining promise in the distance.

This is the thing that you’d probably say if you were trying to unravel this Chinese mystery that you see before your foreign eyes, sitting in a land that heard the buddha speak long ago, that understood and forgot, but found his voice lined in its bones. Now you see China as this, a mystery that continually unravels. You think you’ll understand the core, a massive turban that you unravel in your hands, turning over and over, piling up before you that you find impossibly, perversely never diminishes in size. You tell yourself that there must be a core, or that even if there isn’t, that you must think there is.

I am of the opinion that hearts do not grow stronger; they thicken.

I laugh at anyone who says the age of kings is over.

What man doesn’t want to be a king? What woman doesn’t want to be a queen?

This is the basis of our age; the madness that binds us.

The vision that everyone should live like a king, that everyone can live like a king.

I believe that people have souls in spite of the snickers and cries from hard-headed materialists in the back of the room whose neurological pathways keep them from participating in this illusion that I call a soul, that I call my life-blood, that I call myself.

What would you reductionists not take from your own breath? You know, the one that gasps ineffectual innocence even as it breathes it in?

Look at you traveler. Look at your eyes in the mirror. See how the pupils are flashing black before you.

Could you reckon their meaning? Could you see into their nothingness dividing nothing into nothing? Darkness into darkness? Depth into depth?

Do you even want to?

I am possessed by my dreams, my passions.

If you would ask me how I am different from most people, I would say it is this.

But these others…these others… what is it then when they look at me like a madman?

How do they see me? A foaming, fidgeting madman? Babbling at street light shadows? Lost in dayglow rantings? Chasing the sounds of ringing strings? Hanging on the breath of just-spoken words? Consuming all thoughts of the future, of progeny, of safety for that demon burning inside of me?

Are they devoid of passion? Or are they afraid to let their passions consume them?

I don’t know. To me, they are madmen as well.

When faced with two clear courses of action - the right one which will make me happy, and the wrong one which I know will make me unhappy - why do I choose the one which will make me unhappy?

For me, it is a fear of the unknown, the horror of Happiness and Risk.

Happiness is a woman. She is earnest, but her memory is poor. She forgets the details of anything that happens to her almost immediately. She lives life in the present, but unbeknown to herself, her impact on the future is greater than she realizes.

Her lover is Risk. He’s her soul mate, her male opposite. He is also earnest, but his memory is also poor. He sees things only in the moment, but his actions impact the future profoundly.

Sometimes these two are incredibly happy, strolling through the halls of my mind, greeting the residents of its various chambers as they come out to admire the stately couple. Risk is treating Happiness well.

Other times these two fight, throwing chairs and bellowing at the top of their lungs. The residents of my mind barricade themselves in their chambers, refusing to come out even during the greatest of emergencies. Risk has betrayed happiness.

For a long time, I shut both of them from my mind, not wishing that they should disturb my thoughts. But my mind became a dark and dreary place, and all of its residents were sluggish and unsmiling.

I knew before long I must let these two wander the halls again.

And now I am ready to let them. I’m filled with new hope.

Why you ask?

I remember the forgetfulness of Happiness and Risk. Even if times are hard, neither of them will remember these trials, these betrayals of the past. And just like them, neither should I.

A lesson to aspiring artists:

You know about the golden goose?

The story is only half true. Yes, it did lay golden eggs, but they looked just like regular eggs on the outside, only the insides were made of gold.  In order to get at the gold, you had to crack the outer shell on a pan, just in case it was a normal egg.  Most of the time it turned out that the eggs were regular old eggs, which were never made for being put on a pedestal, only scrambling and frying.

Further, the farmer who killed his golden-egg-laying goose was foolish enough to think that after laying one - just one! - golden egg, the goose was just chalk full of golden eggs. He never thought about all the normal eggs that came before…

The mind of a person with ideas is a party constantly unfolding to reveal hidden relationships, some comic, some tragic: Who knew that you felt that way too? Who knew that we could get on so well? Who knew you could combine this music, these words, this food? Who knew that sexual fantasies could incorporate a palm frond so actively? Who knew that the world could be compared to a balloon animal? Who knew that you could make a night of shopping cart bumper cars? Really? A palm frond? et cetera, et cetera.

This process of unfolding is often aided by the presence of alcohol and dramatic lighting.