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A Daze to Come True (2014)

For I find myself just wanting to wander around, from place to place, not really doing much—ambling. If I had to choose or describe a vocation, it would be this. Observing things, not with a keen eye, or not the most important things, but merely the vague and the mundane, as they appear or as they come to me. I may turn down a street or an alleyway, into a random building, a café or a restaurant egged on by a gust of wind, a flutter that ushers me this way or that way. I don’t want to learn, to repeat history, to experience the most ecstatic, trying so hard to sap the best juice out of the best experience possible. This is exhausting. If I miss something, it doesn’t exist. If I don’t do something, it never happened. For once, I simply want the spectral gaze of my daze to come true.

A Literary Mitosis (On Form) (2014)

Why do I hyphenate and parenthesise and marginalise so much with a ‘/’ or brackets—with everything else I write coming with an ‘and/or’? Sooner or later a frustrated reader/reviewer will be driven to lecture or criticise me for this, so I will take it upon myself to beat them to the punch. I’m surprised I’ve evaded this issue for so long, particularly since it’s literally staring me in the face almost every single day in the form and format of what and how I write. I guess the most obvious criticism is that it shows a lack of control and mastery over language, an inability to decide on a word or make the right choice because, perhaps, I do not understand the full and proper connotations of every word I select and write with, and why should I? When so many words have apt and adequate synonyms and so many dictionaries define their definitions definitively, yet differently and minimally. So, I make the decision to choose both or either/or. For who am I to choose one word over another? So much of this rambling intellectualised jargon about ‘I’ and integrity and intuition and influence and (un)originality is about the inability to grasp and control everything and one’s expression, whether it is predetermined, (pre)influenced, fatalistic, prodigious, integral, philosophical, or/and so forth. So, I guess I’ve naturally or organically decided over time to use and utilise a form that looks and appears to be rigid when in fact it is loose and lucid at best. One thing says more than only one thing using these devices and interwoven formats. I want this writing to have connotations and implications and insinuations, saying more with less and expanding upon vocabulary and linguistics, using tools that shorten and sharpen and cut to ironically elaborate and engage and grasp, breaking and branching out onto or into more by making more out of clasping, fastening but also separating, distinguishing and dividing—a literary mitosis.

The Mission Man (2014)

Though it can also be a speedy transition; a mission of sorts. For I am, can be and have been the mission man, where things irregularly flow from one to the next.

In fact, there is no flow, so much as there is an immediate changeover. As much as I love the ‘in-between’, I attempt to eliminate as much of the time between the ‘in-between’ as I can, in order to be moving on to the next thing. The very next thing is always the thing to be most excited about. And as much as I wanted to come here, then and now, I am disgusted with this place in this moment. Not to mention, I’ve already been here. And I didn’t like it the first time. So why would I enjoy it the second? A persistent delusion of insanity and self-sabotage and the setting up of oneself to fail in the perpetual moment—the moment that is (unendingly) out of reach in the very near future. I was tired of being there so now I am here, and as soon as I am here I want to be there, right now. But I immediately destroy that precious ‘in-between’ as soon as I arrive in the constant and ongoing now-moment because I decide right away that the next thing will be better.

Unable to grapple with the overly ambient or vague concepts in ‘self-help’ books like Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, I—the mission man—liken or align myself more so with the notion of Jack Kerouac’s falling (failing, or flailing) star idea in On the Road: “I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop” (113).

Because, as the psychologist Daniel Kahneman indicates, there is a “conflict between your experiencing self and your remembering self” (238): the experiencing or “current self is the one experiencing life in real time” (236), the remembering self, on the other hand, has to make “all the big decisions. It is happy when you sit back and reflect on your life up to this point and feel content” (237). There is a serious imbalance between these two different selves and the reality that is formed in one’s mind about one’s life as a consequence of this imbalance (238). These two differing selves or perspectives have to be a well-balanced combination of one and the other. “You have to be happy in the flow of time while simultaneously creating memories you can look back on later” (McRaney 238-39).

Conversely, Tolle would argue that there is only the self that exists in the now, and that anything that has happened no longer exists, and anything that will happen does not exist yet, and so both past and future are seemingly irrelevant to one’s sense of contentedness and joy (in the now). I, the mission man, though, tend to lean towards a more Kerouacian approach. I feel helpless in my restless pursuits, endeavours and desires to travel and constantly move, neither fully satisfying oneself or the other, in my tenacious impulsivity.

The funny thing is this makes me stuck in an altogether different kind of ‘in-between’ anyway!

I’m walking, no, running—I am on a mission. There’s always something that needs to be arranged, organised, done—not felt.

The present-now-moment ‘stayers’ watch me, befuddled. “Why can’t he just relax?” they say or think to themselves.

“But I’ll stray from a straight line. I’ll just stray ‘til I’m gone” is what I think to myself in response to their glances, statements and questioning looks.

Like an eccentric ass, I roam and stumble on in a daze, as the figurative apple (of life) swings on a string in front of me.

An Apple on a String Swings in Front of Me (2014)

An apple on a string swings in front of me, dangling in suspense and freeing me from homogeny (a lie)? I look forward through the fence and see the grass is greener, but blurred in my insistent periphery is that laborious fruit compelling forth my effort and greed and corrupted desires, incorrect in all the right ways, to others.

The Island (2015)

Motions frustrated, the predictability of it now. The stagnation follows the same recourse over and over again. Before, now, then after. So obvious, like a mathematical pattern, perfect and (in)solvable in its eloquence.

Majesty. The initiation of social and flirtatious interactions are always perfect. To his friends he comes off as a professional, superficially only, really. The internalised monologue—the soliloquy stews on itself—outwardly, blaming everything else. He could pacify and nullify, reach out to change, became a gamer like the rest, ‘sarging’ with false pretences and smiles turned ‘true’, like the phantom of prowess and the cavalier in us all.

The blame could go further back, to varying circumstances, orbiting incessantly in the streams of imperceptible consciousness.

Staring at voluptuousness, enjoying it, and then turning back to the luminous phosphorescent screens of blankness and nihilism. Sigh and sigh again; he almost has a panic attack. The intuition is there, deep-seated, and probably wrong. Not knowing how to address addresses, then signing off charmingly, poetically, over-the-top in his formality.

Sculpting, perfecting, working at the self—that could help—or, otherwise, it’s all in the countenance, the personality, the self-sabotage or the self-aggrandising.

One intact, in the bag and on her way, while the other (lesser) sits on pins and needles, sick. So, he is sick, sickens himself, stooping lower and lower every day. A sickness, an unrelenting perversion to want and to need and to desire desire. But really the craving is quite neutral, natural, simplified. And, so, the sickness is a systematic perversion pervading and invading everybody else’s personal space.

Apologies.

But forgiveness comes, eventually, tainted by a pity and a need to justify spirituality in the eyes of the on(c)e true beholder. Once resolved, again, back to the screen, back to the phosphorescence, back to the addressing of addresses, of formalism and an awkward charmless countenance on pins and needles and desiring of desire ‘til nothing else remains. Retire, leave, exit the room.

Find comfort in the isolation which really is ultimately preferred but external pressures force a forcefulness onto everybody else: let’s break down and break apart these connectives and relationships one by one for the sake of a nothingness that saturates the heart and soul forming and creating and inspiring a restlessly racing beat on a drum, out of key, out of tune, out of time with the intuition that is needed to perform the actual task.

An analogy of the tactless man as an island:

The shore vainly folds over and under the veil

Wave upon wave sustained in the name of a tidal game

Now the stage is set for all to witness the journey, the whim

Destitute and resolute he flounders precisely and ‘wins’

The Spirit of the Times (2013)

zeitgeist

The amorous subject feels uncomfortably well adjusted to a collective state of stagnant (dis)reality from which he attempts to escape via an exalted and explosive cocktail of self-destruction and personal liberation.

1 We are a self-destructive generation and gradually face a state of deterioration that is completely subjective and totally ill-equipped for our little cluster. Whether we face war, booms, love, or the advances of technology, we all suffer endurably and unwontedly. We fiends must face the facts, but not before the next generation take over, and we vainly attempt to spill our irrelevant advice onto them, and they shelter themselves from it in their erratic displays of angst and self-destructive peacocking portrayals of vulnerable yet violent independence.

2 My dreary eyes wonder and anticipate the future and all other future zeitgeist generations that are yet to come and yet to churn the minds, spirits, and bodies of thoughtful thoughtlessness, thinking tirelessly about all and everything. I wonder about these people, and what they’ll look like and what they’ll say about us! It’s so damn cyclical! We are but another generation and we will not be the last. And we stand at a precipice of wonder and fear and glory; for humankind will always maintain a sense of self that can be best described as frivolously in love with life, regardless of the endless adversity that clouds our endeavours.

3 We ponder in the grey morning in the heaving wooden cabin at the centre of a modern medieval city, having been followed by a bout of drunkenness and confetti brain cell celebrations, and ironic devastations. We sit there and drink stale beer and talk with excited tongues about the word zeitgeist. Time and ghost—a Germanic infusion—an intoxicating cocktail that ensnares and captivates our senses in the most compulsive and reactionary form of excitement. We stand at the edge of reason and jump straight into this fleeting, transitory, yet pivotal moment. We engage and commit to it completely.

4 We sink into a state of exhausted and exalted delirium in which we try to comprehend the bitterness of the sour morning in order to transcend our meagre mortal bodies and become captivated by our own excited notions. Wide-eyed and mad we collaboratively communicate with one another.

5 For we are absolutely and completely engulfed by the system of ethics, attitudes, and morality which we are symptomatically prescribed at an early age—we are nurtured to adhere and abide by certain principles and perspectives from the most impressionable and foetal age. It is the fatal syndrome and entrapment within a skewed field of vision in this postmodern era.

A Sentimental Cynic (2013)

The most frightening and simultaneously liberating thing I can imagine is the sensation derived from absolute and complete loneliness and isolation. I have experienced such a moment. Trapped in the void of my own imagination and excessive thoughtlessness, I found a critical and pivotal form of transcendental clarity. What if there was such a thing as eternity and it was accessible from the arch of the brow and the scope of the mind? And yet there I was, lying sprawled across the floor of a room—the physicality of the situation was real, lucid—and I realised that if I attempted to step outside its doors, I would float into an endless vacuum, and I would be totally alone and my actions would have absolutely no consequences, and I would become and enact my previous lives, up to and including the most recent, in which I had animalistic qualities that I now fail to adequately grasp. Yet I now have total familiarity and reciprocal appreciation for the potentiality of these possibilities. And I was immersed in silent contemplation, and there was so much peace and clarity in this isolation. I began to writhe violently on the floor and engaged in all the rigid-less and residually resonating bodily movements and behavioural motions that would either be deemed unfit, or unnecessary, or unreal or impractical in everyday life. There are actions like this. There are movements like this. The body has the subliminal and subconscious capacity to move of its own free will, and when it does it is devoid of any other responsibilities previously committed to the ego or by the ego, or vice versa, or to the confines of the earth and the upside-down topsy-turvy shelter of the ground beneath the souls of our feet.

The body is malleable and permeable and has the ability to be liberated by the mind’s insidious concentration—to become another organism: a seal, a lotus flower, a parasitical insect hovering over the treetops and mountaintops and yoghurt tops of the containers, tinned cans, atmospheres, ultraviolet rays streaming from the neon lights and hidden messages and fetishes and uncontrollable impulses that are contained and limited by reason, or, in other words, logical and systematic restriction of the wandering ghost of TIME and IT.

And, thus, I am aesthetically free in the centre of this room—this kitchen smouldering with crystalline clarity—in the centre of the universe in which my actions and bodily behaviours have no other consequences but are made primarily for the purpose that they are MADE and that is all. They serve no other function, and that is settling. For it is rare to behave in a way that does not dictate foresight or reminiscence or hindsight or nostalgia—it is rare to behave in such a way that simply fulfils the purpose of IS and DOES and nothing more. And I am satisfied and content in this room with walls and if I do choose to leave through THAT door in the corner, I will enter THAT vacuum of space, and that is my personal prerogative. That is my impulse—my choice.

Yet I notice that there is someone else physically present in here, and he is pouring orange juice, and he is pacing and marching powerfully. Power-marching and pouring juice—these are the fruitful juices of our quenched labour: self-sufficiently satisfying and reciprocating the vitamins and minerals evident in this fantastic room with a doorway that leads to infinite self-satisfaction and SPACE and TIME. The duality becomes clear: action and reaction—onward forward momentum and speed.

I peered out of the window in the room. The sky appeared to be moving, though it may have been the room itself. Or perhaps time is in a playful projection of sky and stars that occasionally dance around and explode into an image of ultimate infinity, and what some saints or mystics or believers might refer to as God, who was reincarnated in the night sky, stemming from a cluster and combination of bright shining mythical lights glaring and projecting their past tens of thousands of years into the future and into the current contemplative contempt-filled contemporary world. Stars—they are the real philosophers—the time travellers of future incomprehensible destinies that we simply cannot fathom—our potential is too unrefined to compete with such forces of grandeur that live and breathe and swell and implode in the restlessly racing night sky.

Yet my dreary eyes continue to wonder and anticipate the future and all other future generations yet to come and churn the minds, spirits, and bodies of thoughtful thoughtlessness, thinking tirelessly about all and everything. I wonder about these people, and what they’ll look like and what they’ll say about us! We are but another generation and we will not be the last. And we stand at a precipice of wonder and fear and glory, for humankind will always maintain a sense of self that can be best described as frivolously in love with life, regardless of the endless adversity that clouds our endeavours.

Yet we shelter ourselves and themselves and yourselves and all selves that are mimicked and mimed and translucent and adjacent to their own sense of self. This room—this cluster of collective experience and truth and ‘Dharma’ and IT and TIME—as insightful as it all may be, it cannot be enacted or produced in any artificial way. It is too unreal, too unorthodox, too strange and alien and foreign and unpredictable. Our collective selves cannot REALISE the now. It is too much of a frightening thought. As frightening as the ironic fear and timidness in which I initially approached the trajectory of this projection room. It is frightening and liberating. Simultaneously, of course. But it is reason and logic that will always be victorious. Those sinners have a firmer ‘understanding’ of the realities of perception and its rigidity as something that is ingrained and anchored and clawed into the now-frozen streams of our conscious mind. And, so, we continue to shelter our ‘selves’ in our erratic displays of angst and self-destructive peacocking portrayals of vulnerable yet violent independence—a continually restless battle between mind and matter and what actually matters in the mind.

‘Til Morning Came (2013)

There are certain times, points of the day, that instil a sparse consciousness—a recognition had many times before by many others over the course of human history. This is time, and these are times felt and to be felt by others, in obscurity or promiscuity, vanity, selflessness, or loneliness.

Last night I lay awake ‘til morning came, and the sun shone through the cracks of my drawn curtains, and I tried to ignore the slight rays. Throughout the night I kicked and churned and writhed around in bed, making an absolute mess of my doona covers, and the pillows, which I held tightly or kicked violently yet fervently, here and there. I scrunched them up and held them and punched them or pinned them down in a mangled jumble of ecstasy and softness, and pleasure. And eventually a romantic kind of calm ensued from this incensed love.

Over the course of the night and the hours that dragged by, I thought about my relationships with the various people in my life. I was sentimental, yet I pondered my interactions with these folk, these friends and family, these associates, these charming entities, in quite a detached way. I thought of ‘us’ as a whole, an organism and my place (with)in that organism, and what I actually mean, what my place is among all these collected perspectives?

A change definitely came about in me. I considered my regrets and played out the storylines and the narratives of how things would have been and could have been in some of my relationships if I’d known what I do now. I thought about how different the story would have turned out, how much closer I would have been with some that I am now estranged from, and how much more distant I could have been with the ones I am now closer to—the ones I do not need, respect or appreciate any more.

The tragedy in the matter is that it is almost impossible to reignite a flame with the people lost in plights of stupidity, or gradual, graduating, deteriorating detachment. And it is just as impossible to disconnect with the ones clamped to your lifeline or stuck like mosquitoes in the sap of a tree, oozing alongside you, until hardened and stuck in place by time, sort of like that determining scene in Jurassic Park (1993).

So, you cut yourself down and leave the broken forest, town or city from whence you came, and still that sap trails along with you, stuck to your side uncomfortably, lukewarm, despite the recognition you just do not have any fondness for it these days.

Last night my cynicism was nil.

Today I am tainted by the everyday monotony of my rambling groans, droning on as usual.

Last night I was affectionate to all. I considered the avenues and possibilities of love that I should direct outwardly. I thought about my dedications to one or the other. I considered putting my trepidations aside, and the doubt that is always there. I considered lying in bed with a multitude of partners and telling them truths, all true, but unique and individualised, personalised to all of those lovers, physical or not.

I considered kindness as a new form or brand of my personality—something that only really ever existed with traces of sarcasm that are way too ingrained to tolerate or are perhaps in the process of becoming so. I considered replacing my cold, hardened (now flabby) body with hope and a sense of fulfilment that others may intuitively recognise and take for themselves. I considered blossoming in the fecundating pool of dreariness and misery, closed off from others, looking upwards at the sky and the stars, and protected by further aggravation that others cannot see. I thought about changing superficially, and how that change might somehow lodge itself into deeper sensations, reviving them with the promise of goodness, genuine excitement and yearning.

I thought about reparations, justice, and community once again. I considered the importance of optimism and its effects on the self over time, time and time again.

I thought about these things—I considered them—I even believe in some of them now.

Normally there would be a ‘but’ in there somewhere, and even now I am searching for the problematique, but for now there is none. There is just relief.

Tears (im)practically came to my eyes as I contemplated the love I sincerely and genuinely do have to offer, but a hardened shell of contempt shields me from what I actually want. ‘Self-sabotage’ is my motto; I have nothing to gain from this but a resolute sterility that no one cares about, or that anyone wants to touch. Why bother then? It is more of an effort to hide behind this shield than to care and subsequently not have a care in the world.

Herein lies a ‘slice of (my) life’, influenced by not so much a feeling or a sensation but an attitude towards a betterness/bitterness, an attitude that can act as the driving force … an attitude that can, over time, be acted upon, fulfilling the ideals and desires I have released here.

Alter yourself, or enforce alterations, and the result will be an inevitable compromise of an attitude that could sanctify your spirit and the will to save yourself or myself (again); that is an important lesson I have learnt about myself.

Now run.

When looking into the essence or “quintessences” of human nature, perhaps experiencing enlightenment does not always necessarily have to stem from a “long” and “immense” period of time and derangement of the senses, as Rimbaud (9) insisted. The human response does not always have to be a passionate one, when confronted with ultimatums, the pinnacles, ‘fight or flight’ scenarios, radically menacing or dangerous environments and situations. How the individual reacts and copes when at the very precipice of fear or terror or anger or lust or revenge or whatever, is to find deep-seated internal precipice. And when something mundane, trivial or tedious does occur, what does that mean and what can we derive from it, symbolically and metaphorically, when one is reacting or feeling or thinking with a full heart and mind right then and there? I am not sure, but is that reversal of emotion and transcendental clarity an impossibility? In a sense, that is one of the things I am trying to realise here: the everyday, relatable or not, triggers of a soul/psyche in a consciously settled reality … in motion (walking, running, accommodating, associating, traversing, travelling).