Endless Train

If it is not enough to remove the mental blocks standing in the way between you and that infinite it-ness then you have to go out looking for it. Incomputable, it is something in the essence, the in between of being and being alive. The short circuited shoulder of comfort  through art. There may not be anything inherently meaningful about a crushed pop can in a frame but there is still everything it can mean, under the right light.  It’s either in you or it’s not, to see that thing alive, to see it as a representation of deeper commentaries that push their way through the pit of your soul asking for expression. There may not be meaning in the thing itself, but art can speak, through artist and witness.

But does art really save, or does it merely isolate further? Does belief in the abstract give us enough to live our lives by or does it tear away the flesh from the bone, isolating us from humanity by way of partitioning it into segments of those for and those against? After all if you are trying to express something universal, some touchstone at the center of it all, do you not need the mind and eyes of all? Not just the ones who have the tools to see the multiple layers in the fabric you have created? If it becomes easy to write the world off, in yet you crave to carve in expression of it, then what exactly are you expressing?

Once again it seems we are faced with a choice, either you are going to do something or you’re not and if you already know the answer than there is nothing left to debate. Get on the train and ride it out of the station and damn the consequences, because they are just the consequences of the inevitable, of the choice you have already made before you took it up in guilt and conscience to be examined as some navigable doctrine. Most choices are already made, either by heart or head or belief. 

To get out and see the world was a choice completed in the silence of the first car ride I can remember. Feet up, head down I watched the crayons melt in the back window and the scenery go rushing past me; mountains and tall pines, blue waters of fresh lakes and the exhilarating wiz of other vehicles on their way to countless destinations. It was the first time I was made more complete in my first-hand knowledge of other things and had the realization that I had the misconception to think that all rocks were black. In fact they can be a myriad of colors, coral rose with flecks of sparking diamond white, limestone paste with blue azure checks. They can be flat or rolling, but more importantly they could exist outside of what I knew. It was the first time I saw things change in the passing weight of time and distance. Life can change this way, in the particulate of window sunshine, in the absorption of differentness, and in knowledge of how things are outside of one’s self. 

It was the first time I was gifted the calm passing reverie for change and solitude. My placid adolescent gaze was set afire with possibility, the possibility to see all the change I could and be enriched by it. The choice was made, in that moment in the back-seat, whether I knew it or not, it was made in the flickering light of a noon-day sun that I have been chasing that ever since. 

And now as my eyes waver and close over these stretching desert-like plains I know I have found it again, this strange yet familiar place where thinking is merely a matter of inhaling and exhaling and not conscious decisions. It isn’t 1.2” margins or APA citations or a reading list of irrelevant books. It is the things you pick up in breathing and sight. It is the size and distribution of volcanic ash over unfamiliar land masses, it’s knowing things, not academically, but internally, as one knows the feeling of lifting their own arms, or tasting their favorite food. It is knowledge of life and self through the direct experience of it, eating it up in chunks. Knowing that rocks can be pink or blue or purple not by photograph or imagination but in the rough cracked surface of those colors as you pass your hand along them. This place is strange, the language and customs stranger, but I roll on seeking out new nights and new days, not because it assuages loneliness or longing or home-sickness. Not because it makes you necessarily happy or comfortable, but because it speaks of being apart of something larger through the experience of it. And the decision to seek that particular sensation out, was made long before I could have a memory of it. It is the inherent predisposition of being human, to be on the train you can’t get off.