From Other Side of the World

I know it' s been a while since I have posted anything. After leaving Europe in early September to head to the 'land down under' I wanted to give myself some time to relax and just live life in a more momentary way. This past year has been filled with challenges as well as some of the most rewarding moments of my life to date. For those of you who have been following along with me, thank you. Thank you for your support and for taking the time to see into and through some of my more abstract attempts at expressing the nature, colour and texture of reality as I perceive it.

New places, new things, on wards and upwards!

It's is hot and dry and expansive. It's sparse and magical. Isolated by archipelago shift everything that grows here is just a little bit different. It doesn't matter where you look, you will see something you have never seen before. Initially it seems familiar, but that is merely expectation. Everything that is common is exceptional. I am working in a pub in a small town in Queensland. It is a town of 1800 people, three bars, no cinema, no MacDonald's, no shopping mall and roaming kangaroos. Everyone is bound together here by the innate sympathy that comes from sharing a small expanse of space in the middle of nowhere.

This town carries people in and out like tidal waves. Fuelled by a booming mining industry, the blackened face, florescent clad night shift boys go roaming around in work trucks, trolling for something to descend into while they wait till the next shift. Clouds of effervescent boredom cover the faces sitting and drinking till dawn. Trying to find their place in this temporary world to which they don' t really belong. The smokers and the non-smokers, the livers and the drinkers, the cornucopia of differences are all made equal, by the uniforms of industry.

Here there is nothing to fear. No pretensions, no reasons to be anything in particular. I have never been so free of expectation, with references to Heidegger or Tolstoy getting you revolving slowly around the outer orbits of the fun nucleus. It's easy to to laugh away a joke, instead of deconstructing it. And if you really need to, you can launch a few over the crowd, and see where it lands.

This is Europe in it's negative print. It's my life of a year, in reverse, and it's splitting the images of what I am in two; this and that. Though I wouldn't say it's entirely dualistic, it's more of a deeper understanding of what we are all we are capable of. Of the endless possibilities of person-hood in the eyes of new lovers, friends and places. The fluidity of nature and existence is still present, as we remove once again the restrictions on what we think we. Allowing the cement to float up amongst the settled waters of contentment we rise, once again, the phoenix from the ashes. 

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.

Continuing On

I have life beyond life. I have power beyond power. I have lived and breathed and died a million times more than I could ever write. I have existed with passion and without, through emptiness without thought of loneliness because I spoke fire, breathed soot and tasted the decay of my most precious metal -  my dreams. My thoughts my ideologies, my ambitions, they sputter forward like little ducks, following forth behind an untraceable, unimaginable goose. My mother hen, the subtly and essence of consciousness. The why, the agency, the qui and the quoi. 

Why I love is not the same as who I love. Who is just a passing metaphor, a glimpse at possibility, the what is the deciding factor, an aggregate sum of fate and inevitability. Why I am alive is not a question but an answer to the darkest questions I have ever feared to ask.  To live as an open gate, is to swing forth in the breeze and answer the call of all those winds that pass forth amongst the trees. To be human in the wind, to remain alive in the swaying factoids that push and pull you width wise and side wise, is to hold desperately to the rushing necessity that stems from cradling unborn dreams.  A dead weight is the eye that rests on its still born child. A mannequin of all possibilities. I shake and move and recreate the motions in an effort to spit forth this melonous weight, this heaviness in my belly that begs for life. It demands the sacrifices of a million fires. The heads of a thousand toads and the lonely empty stretching plane of that desolate highway towards selfhood. It’s not about staring into the abyss, it’s about eating the abyss of existential hopelessness for breakfast and asking for seconds. Seconds, seconds, seconds. Fuck you. I’m coming for more. And this time I’ll swallow you whole, because this time I know the score. No need to be an assimilated dot amongst the mist, to understand the process of evaporation. This time I stand as the mountain and let the water rain down. I let the pieces of the ripe tide pass my impenetrable surface and spit them forth a waterfall in the spectrum of light.

24 Hours in Rome

It glows.

In the setting sun I move amongst architecture and ground hallowed and historic. I am full of the basic necessities of life after eating my fresh grilled panini and cold beer overlooking the Colosseum. The streets here are cobbled and cluttered with the sounds of  impatient drivers and scurrying pedestrians. I remove my shoes to feel the shadows cast my feet onto these ancient rocks. In a glance Rome is the smell of dust and tomatoes, bugs, cars, buses, tourists with sore feet, blankets laid over in trinkets and souvenirs, costumed Roman Gladiators and the upside down triangle of fingers brandished in constant emphasis.  The past, the present, the old the new, things that are built for now and things that are built for all time, they grow and decay in a garden of din and beauty, wavering with the horizon, buzzing under the pressure. This, as all things, victims of the same fatal disease tearing the holes through these ruins.

Just ten hours ago I was home. Now, on my own again my eyes are open and the heart leads on, past eroding edifices and into winding unlit passages that spin me face first into this living history book. I'm back. One with my intuition. Making proper turns without a map, stumbling into everything I need to see. I can be so many things out here, covered in the tapestries of these historic worlds. I can feel tradition pass through the walls that are falling down around me; it stretches and grows the skin covering the insatiable girl residing within it. And through my placid gaze I realize how much better that skin feels now in the triumph of all these memories, under that warm ichor sun that is falling slowly, this July evening in Rome.

It isn't lost on me now, how fortunate I am to be here. To live life filled with adventure and reward. To know that the world is a place made infinitely smaller and simpler through the experience of it. At every turn we can wake up to the joy that is the inevitability of this; we are given what we need, if we allow ourselves to be shown just what that is. To live, to breath, to see, to exist in all our imperfection, surrounded by the intangible, is the essence of living that which is greater than ourselves.

Before I went home I pined and longed for the sound of poplar trees. Longed for the fulfilled promise that we could swim this flood of newness and isolation for that familiar harbor. But what was missed drifting for that ephemeral shore was that home was always apart of the rising seas around us.  We carry a piece of all the souls who crash into us in that particular way that causes us to call them friends, lovers, and family. Their blessings are in the breeze and finally, finally, I can feel it here. The pride and thanksgiving accrued in 24 years. For me continuing on, being alive in this way, chasing these ideas around the world is more than given in any embrace. To show up again to challenge old trauma and all preconceptions. To deliver on our potential. That is the connecting solidarity between me, the ones I love, and the experiences I long for. I see more. I do more. I live more, for all of us. Because the world needs it. Because we need it;

to be lifted up,

in expectation, 

purpose,

and joy.

Fossil

There is a war within me. Two opposing forces that are playing out an epic life long battle of wills. It is a war of sentiment, on one hand good enough, on the other - never. They are reactionary but they are also inherent.

I have come home to a place where familiarly is only implied, no longer expressed in the essence of things that have waited in animate apathy for my return.

I have lived a year of restless solitude, inhabiting a dark-like space and filling it with glory, mercy and grace through great moments. The beautiful sunrises, the mountain landscapes, the warmth between new friends, challenges faced and surmounted. It has been a year of tremendous change and tremendous struggle and now, face to face with the context provided by home it seems impossible to hold on to the revelations, impossible to transfer the feeling of being so in charge yet so out of control it nearly kills you. But of course, it doesn’t. It creates texture and color and music in the deepest parts of you. It isn’t always joyous, but it is a melody of allegory and change, sometimes somber, sometimes rapturous, but always ringing out within. To say that I know myself now would be disingenuous. It would presumptuous to think that there is some type of constructed personality, or internal character that you can know this way; as one would uncover an old dinosaur bone in the layers of hardened sediment.

The creation of the fossil is the discovery of it.

Each experience is hot magma, compression and the scattering of carcasses. Each day that I woke up with challenge in my heart and the newness on my tongue I pressed these things together and saw that they were mine. That is how the self becomes myself, you claim it, one bone at a time.

So I wandered Europe, collecting bones and looking for new light to see them in. Looking for the meaning that would truly set straight the confliction between wanting to fit in and tear the whole thing apart. Tear apart all conceptions of reality so there were no more lines to draw, no more crosses to bear, no more have to’s. I wanted there to be only me and the open seeable universe to sink my feet into.

And I have seen it this way; sitting on a cliff overlooking a blackened midnight ocean being eaten by the reflecting stars. It’s in the knowledge of inevitability, how fate and fortitude walk hand in hand when you finally put all those chips on the table. When you look the future in the eye and say ‘this is what I’ve got, I’m either going to make it or not’.

And you do.

And you do.

But like any migrating creature the time comes to return to home. Here back in the snow globe of old hang-ups, old anguish, old fears are so many unanswered questions. Maybe we’ve been inside this glass dome all along? Thinking we were traversing great distances but really we were just spinning in concentric circles around the same thing everyone is; the gravity of pleasure, to please and be pleased.

The Great Finale

Europe in all your manicured glory look what you've done. Teetering from your 6 inch stilettos putting a spike through this. On one side; the pouring emptiness, black like clouds, rolling around in soot and ash. The other; crystalline swordfish, beauty in magnitudes of 100 degrees. Whipping about your unlit passages. Juggling your cluttered groves. Stone angles and demons, rebels in new wave mullets. And even though beneath it all is everything I may still never know, this much I do know is true - these streets are as muddy with my footprints as I am with you. This is Europe. I have spent nine months staring at people staring at things. Taking picture of people taking pictures of things. Big things, small things, old things, new things. Concrete and gravy. People rocking back and forth without realizing it as they sit out for tapas. Licking their tiny bowls and dancing their greedy eyes on each other. Europe you clever devil. How did you manage to pack that much bullshit into one sales pitch? Sure America has it too, telling you what you want and when you need it. But you, you polish it chrome make it half the size and charge twice as much. Selling dreams. Selling quality of life. I don't trust anyone anymore with a moleskin notebook. Don't get me wrong. I am not resistant the charm. There are so many things that are just better here. But even as I dare to criticize this idyllic paradise I know concern, its exposure will be met with serious resistance from those who need to keep the dream alive. I treasure the things I have seen. The developing further a serious love for contemporary art. Culture continues to intrigue me. But to study this, is to study a travel brochure. All of this is dependent on telling ourselves what is good and what is bad until it encroaches in on itself; an artistically decorated box. Here is what I see. Intermittent with vacillating exasperate joy is the desire to continue to push back. Push this thing on its head and tell it to stand for me. It's the desire to shake people from their perfect hateful conceptions of themselves. It's pictures of manicured, pedicured, over-cured meat. Its money. Old money and old men. Little china dolls, overdressed children. Its people living lives yes, struggling, destitute, hopeless lives. It's chasms and schisms and rocks. Its youth and it's age, together at last, looking for the same thing, but staying at different hotels. I have spent nine months in Europe watching people on vacation. Watching family dinners by candlelight.  Watching lovers roll around themselves in midnight embraces.  It's the feeling that despite travel being my life's ambition, despite it being all I can think to do with myself, despite it being the one thing that was to save my soul, despite all of this - they need it more than I do. This casual jazz music on terrace patios over-looking history. They need it to be good. Better than what they know. They need the romanticism to capitulate them towards better pictures of themselves. Mirror plates over sewer grates. Its ok too you know, that it exist like this. Marginally more real than Disney World. Its the nature of things. Of cities, of people, of the Western world. Times progress speaks through it. Its decades, centuries of money and growth and progress widdled down and chained between past and future. Between standing tradition and the influence of the new West. Its my cultures elders and with that comes a certain amount of knowledge of how to do things. Unfortunately its what they cannot teach us that continues to haunt me. Happy enough to find beautiful ways of balancing among the ripples, the disturbances source remains lost in time and tailored clothes. Lost in its own perfect cobble stone roads. Perfect intersecting rows, left ,right, left, right right. It's just a pattern too. A pattern about bringnig about the flavor in olive oil, the complexities in wine, but not the essence of this. Why need this in the first place. The coddling love of crafted lives. Money still owns you here. Maybe more than anywhere. This is a refined system of human government. Of casual perfected complacency. Of knowing where you stand and caring less and less in the distracting spittle of an 18th century fountain.

Simplicity More or Less

Two little girls.

one piece of chalk.

disobedience

like an excited ferret,

in their grasp.

one act.

the joy of being,

mischievous.

side long glances

with trepidation streaked brows

as they scurry off,

into the dusk.

--------------------------------------

time keeps me

god know I cant keep it

prisoner,

executioner.

there is a will in it

more ancient

and deadly

then original sin,

it holds me

in its cold embrace

and reluctantly,

unskillfully,

I follow.