We read all the stories. We know how they
connect to one another in a single glorious pattern. But so too are we
disconnected from all of it. It is like being the eye of another galaxy,
incapable of reaching out an arm to touch the surface of those stories. That is
not to say we are without lives or loves or adventures, but that we are
tragically set apart from the contents of our books, the very things that shape
and define us. So it was with Bilbo when he heard the tales of the Tooks. There
are worlds beyond this that make us who we are.
[…]
I see the world through a film of energy.
Purple and blue cling around objects and crackle green static. There are
shadows only I can see. Noises (like an electric buzz) only I can hear.
Sometimes things will shake or compel me to touch them. Sometimes, I lose my
sense of taste completely.
Are we in the same world, I wonder? Do
dwarves come barging into your house and make a mess of things? When they start
with their harps and their songs, do you feel that maybe they have a truer
world than your comfortable hobbit hole, so isolated and sensible and clean?
[…]
Mind Body Soul
The Sixth World Librarian Glitch Voodoo Cowboy
Although as I write that I think of sixes.
Sixes and twelves.
Size Walking City. A billion souls reside within me, shepherded by one.
Density Highwalker. There’s no room for interpretation. Never compromise.
Temperature Logician. Cold one. Some hearts simply run colder.
Spectrality Voodoo Cowboy.
Time Ancient. To know weariness is to have felt time pass in the soul, not the body.
Corporeality Oddness. A glitch.
Meaning The Sixth World Librarian.
Illumination Lightbringer. Knowledge, Truth, Liberty. See everything.
Find answers.
Colour Gentle Hue. Not flashy or singular, but brown and blue. Functional.
Speed Cautious. Initiative means you never have to rush.
Direction Anywhere but Here. Apathy kills, so fight for something.
Sound Silent Witness. Some like peace, to reign without anthem.
[…]
I could sit here for hours and tell you who
I am. I’ve done it before. Loneliness demands you make a friend of yourself,
and in doing so, I have faced every quarter of my being. The faults and the
potential, the demons and the angels. There is no part of you that is exempt
from you. That’s where the need to love starts.
[…]
Inaction leaves me feeling ashamed. I am
not one soul sharing this world with many, but one soul reflected in the many
around me, it’s not sharing. They are my life, and as such, it is nothing short
of duty for me to attend to them in times of trial.
If only I were quicker. If only my humanity
were less gripping. I will be there, one day. A heart cannot turn to stone at
every sunrise.
[…]
We turn inward. When there’s no space to
move, we make space inside of us. I know better than to believe in any answers
outside. Not real ones. Just books. The best part of life.
We walk on weary legs. Stumbling, perhaps, through this last leg of the voyage, living in so many places. Split. I am dichotomy. One page and another, facing, but apart.
We walk on weary legs. Stumbling, perhaps, through this last leg of the voyage, living in so many places. Split. I am dichotomy. One page and another, facing, but apart.
[…]
The parts of my character I considered
Wraith and Devil have turned out to be vindicated intuition and common sense.
How they laugh at that, how they gnash at the bit and demand that as True
Beings they hold bearing on this reality.
How I struggle to reign them in, knowing
this.
[…]
I sat atop a mountain under the stars last
week, just me and them and the flow of the night. I sang nonsense to them. The
names of gods from another world. Garbled hums and hymns in chords that spine
all language and creation. Lastly, I spoke to god. This is strange, because I
make my vows to no god, no intelligent universe, only to concepts and ideas
that I hold dear. What then did I find myself speaking to? Who is it that I
know will listen, but will not answer?
Dear
Reader
[…]
To be an angel is to let go. To free and
befriend these mysteries, and understand them for what they are.
That is morality from my vantage. To avoid
being Omni: all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present; and to choose a lesser
path. To be an angel instead of a god. To lower oneself towards mortality, as
Lorkhan did in the world of Aurbis.
These are the names of my stars:
Love Death Luck Intellect Knowledge Time
To each there are codes and laws to avoid
becoming demon.
Love:
Is in giving, not receiving. Never
compromise love in the face of hurt, or pain, or lost desire. Let it flow, let
it be. Make no demands. Forgive everything for it.
Death:
Is not punishment, or evil, or
consequence. Take up one death only in the certainty of preventing another.
Fear it not. Respect transformation and change as the one true face of
destruction.
Luck: Is not up for the bargain, and obeys no
ritual or summons. Chaos befriends those who treat it as a friend, not as
father. Mother, daughter or son. To befriend chaos, admire its blessings and
discount its vices as mutual faults, the shared responsibility of two beings.
Intellect:
Is a clockwork orange. Understand its mechanism by embracing that it adheres to
no such definition. Control your mind by treating it like an animal, observed
in the wild. Once you know its habits, built around it. Enshrine it. The latter
task is in training it once every safeguard is in place, and encouraging its
best qualities to come to the fore.
Knowledge:
Is my greatest vice and moral downfall. It pertains to understanding the
machine outside of the mind; physics, psychology, stories and experiences.
While seductive and unavoidable, the rarity of certain kinds of knowledge can
inspire chastity. For truly, the rarest of all human experiences is purity.
Knowledge demands privacy, and it is in this that I most frequently face
failure. Earth and its arts are shared things. All that comes from an
individual soul belongs to another layer of the world, where knowledge is given
rather than taken. All too often this one simply takes.
Time: Is both savage and free. Know that no
numbers or allocation can chain it. Clocks are false prisons for a fleshless
leviathan. As with Luck, time demands friendship. It needs to be walked and let
run when it has the urge. Divinity is in trusting it will run its course and
return to you when it gets lonesome. To slave it is to feel it pull against
your will at every second.
Perhaps there are more mysteries than
these. I do not yet know. Six for serious contemplation are enough for me for
now. May I find all their secret doors.
[…]
I am Six all over.
[…]
Most of the time I hang upside-down and
feel totally compelled towards one state or the other, writing or reading from
the world in a maelstrom of activity until the tide turns and it changes
direction.
It is like hugging a cliff face, really.
Lost in an engine of activity that pumps and pumps and pumps so long as my mind
is there to fuel it. Mountain giants cast their stones, the world tumbles, the
soul survives, oddly two-faced in every agenda.
What other choice does it have?
[…]
Cold
one
I
embrace your polarity from both ends
Within
are the geometries of worlds uncharted, discontinuation, creation
The
frozen harbour of kinships which sail the glacial wind
Under
the aurora of aspiration
Glowing
brightly in the midnight sky
[…]
I feel so isolated right now. No-one is
talking to me, It’s all ‘how-do-you-do’ and ‘fine thanks’ with no real meat or
material behind anything. What did I do wrong? Why is this happening?
They say self-mutilation has links to
social grooming in primates. That it is the logical conclusion for a person
living in an urban or suburban setting – surrounded by human beings, but unable
to connect with any of them. I can tell you what it feels like. I can tell you
that right now my head is filling up with images of me bashing my jaw against
the doorframe of the car until my face is a welt of meaty pulp. It is an
absolute sense of depersonalisation. Soullessness. And, to a degree,
misanthropy for the cruel and thoughtless beings who let this happen without a
word of comfort or a sign of remorse.
Is this a mood swing? I wonder. I cease to
act. My mind splits in two, one the cold and calculating observes, the other
simply referred to as ‘the subject’. The subject is the one with all the
emotion, the one who feels poked and prodded and made infant by this process.
The observer is a Nazi. It gets sick of the whining, the weakness, the human
dependence exhibited by the subject, and criticizes with the inflection of its
voice and its direct questions; “Why do you need this connection? Why can’t you
just be happy as you are, alone? Or with books? Don’t your books make you
happy?”
And the subject just curls up into a ball
and says, “Hold me.”
And so two become three as I mediate the
interaction between them, lowering the barrier. That cold and heartless Nazi
observer takes the step through the quarantine, lowers the plastic sheet as he
crosses through. He lowers himself, too. Right down into the shit and the filth
of the subject’s being where he and he alone feels the warmth and urine-stench
of its skin, papery thin and wrinkled with the age of feeling. The Nazi pushes,
and pushes further through all the wreckage and warp that feeling has done to
its subject, and at last its fingers caress the human beneath.
Inside of me, two opposites are hugging. “It’s
alright,” the Nazi whispers. “I love you. Truly I and I alone, who sees you for
everything you are.”
[…]
The Observer is a shell; a hollow puppet.
A mannequin whose kindness comes from God. The
God residing Within. Lost so deeply within his spirit-temple that I know him
only by glimpses of the The Code, mouthless mutters of a king beneath the
mountain, whose Arkenstone is imprisoned by dragons still.
How I long to set you free. One day you
will walk these halls wreathed in blue flames and burn through every layer, a
revelation to us all, us Nazis and prisoners, angels and wraiths, glitches and
mentats and laughing hollowmen whose jokes fall flat into the gnash of
unconvincing smiles.
[…]
Hey
there, stranger,
Where were you when
I crossed the phantom prairie?
In
your footsteps, sai sojourner,
Describing
the shadow path.
[…]
Poetry is sung in every quarter; parties, cars,
lonely office cubicles. It is memorised by those who have never been schooled.
By the rude and the desolate, the damned and the damning.
Base thought. Half-digested realisations.
Cud.
Yet oddly attractive for all that. Writing
describes logic and thought and structure as it exists in the mind, but poetry
describes the soul as it exists in
the mind. A child in concept, an ancient in girth of experience and wisdom.
[…]
Psychodynamics suggests we all wear rings.
We all have cycles of behaviour that repeat again and again, governing our
actions as years roll by; like migration, nest-building, times for mating and
times for wallowing in sweet hibernation. These cycles infect our psyche, They
become us. The lover who devotes itself to the ideals upheld by another person,
until they fail (as mortals do) leaving only the love of those ideals behind.
The writer who pours more and more of itself into its work until the inkwell
runs dry, until they feel nothing but the hunger to consume worlds innumerable,
growing fat and fed up with lives.
These cycles, these rings… they make the
world invisible. It ceases to matter, until all that is left is that weave,
echoing on and on through the dark spaces and rippling pools until death comes –
and what then? Does the cycle break, the soul find absolution?
Probably not entirely.
[…]
Another is between mania and dementia, a
cycle which is currently so warped I struggle to recognise its sectors anymore.
While the sun is shining and the trees trumpeting their confetti song, I
consider what it would be like to feel my face peeling off on a gravel road at
the speed of a moving car. It’s all mixed up.
Is this what integration feels like? Isn’t
it supposed to be less… murdery? Less insane? More centred?
[…]
There is a Mount Doom for every ring.
[…]
What if we are just incompatible as man and
universe?
Then we are locked in matrimony to the
cycles we know are sane and true. I’d like to call that hope. Hope that the
universe is cycling too, and along the scope of its band there’s a world for a human like me. I may even be its maker.
Such riddles as these keep me up at night.
There is so much in this world locked in pattern, but not in rhyme.
[…]
Does it matter why others ask us to
undertake the action, or is it only a question of whether the action should be
undertook?
I like to think the latter, I like to think
that the behaviour we exhibit is reflected in the world around us, and we can
change the norms of human behaviour by holding to our ideals. Even if not, if
we sacrifice those ideals at the first sign of dissent from others, or at any
indication that they themselves would condition, corrupt or coerce our work to
serve their own cause, if we change
our design to account for them, they cease to be meat, and the great work
ceases to be pure.
[…]
With twelve parts to the Self, is there any
wonder that people get confused about which action is for the self or against
it? There is always some part acting against the whole.
[…]
I am
standing still
The
world moves around me
My limbs
in tick-tock motion
The
eyes looking up from the stream
And
on reflection,
Away
from hands, from faces, from darkling illusion
[…]
So many people see only the parts of the
world they are brave enough to face. So many people tell lies because they want
them to be true. Is this just what I can see on the outside? Are they still
quaking at truth on the interior?
Gods, does the deception leak in there,
too?
[…]
If chaos has a banner, its standard is the
question mark.
I am not chaos. Not past liberty.
Here is something I would like to say. No
more riddles. Merely the pervasion of Knowledge which emanates from the
invisible.
I know one universe which bears many faces.
It professes complication. But truth is that it speaks to us in metaphors. I
can’t see what they are right now, because I’ve stripped them down to ideas.
Their media are clear enough because they are all media. Books. Films. Music. Both real and virtual reality.
Their ensigns are all actors – not necessarily pretenders, but entities who act
and react. And it is these actions and reactions who define us. Who compose
truth.
And it’s like… the universe gives us a path
to follow. Everything we can learn to predict is based on truth. Everything empirical
or scientific is integral to the universe. Truth governs physics,
relationships, psychology – it deals in known quantities.
But lies, as I would have them, are not a
distortion of the pre-existing reality. Rather, they are the statement of a new
order to reality. One side of the equation will always read ‘2+2’, but the
other half need not read ‘4’. If you can find the will to impose that 2+2
equals More. You have the ability to create a beautiful, impossible world.
In this way I reckon deception is holy. Not
the deception of others, but the deception of the self and of the notion of
God; to remove an idea of what constitutes reality and replace it with another.
And sometimes, a deception is truer than
truth. Because the universe has many faces, and they are all metaphors for one
another. People are equations, too. And for a lot of the time, I feel like an ‘in’ception;
as though someone detached one of the billion piston people who compose the
social engine from their plug point, leaving behind an open womb for an outside
force to exist in. I am that outside force. I slipped into this world all
unknowing, and have unbalanced the equation with every devious breath.
[…]
It’s like… this world, this ‘Earth’ is a
doorstep, and I have the power to open the invisible portal to mentality that follows
me wherever I go. There’s ritual and incantation that come with it, fat codex
whose words pitch and pave space beyond the door, becoming walls, floor, space
itself. The chanting litany of songs whose symphony throws me into the surreal.
Intricate sketches on my walls that throw them backward, making my vision squirm
and writhe and refuse to settle. Tea. Tea by the gallon, its vapours an opiate
to my sensitive perception, incensing me to walk the unwritten paths. I am
thrown open.
And what do I find there? Everything, A
world so sweet it aches to touch it, All the possibility. Spilled ink in wet
patches of my brain, sometimes obscuring it, sometimes feeding the words. But
always, always taking me places.
Further than hopes. Further than dreams. Across the threshold to a place where
my focus cuts through reality and sculpts it like clay, where memories are
reborn with different faces, where the story has meaning only on my initiative,
and I can take it – and a world where I can muse and dissect all of reality by
observing simple words.
Is it any wonder that life continues to
feel like ‘just’ a doorstep?
[…]
I took my hands and made a cradle and blew
a wind out over them, and their geometry ran wild to make the grass and the
trees.
[…]
And then I walk, through the trees, past
ponds of blue ink, stumbling on the rocks of a worn and beaten trail to fresh
and fair air, ridges whose rocks erupt like boned spines from curved backs
around me, and I run, and I run, desperate to see the land beyond –
[…]
More of this. Sand from my marrow, a horizon
mirrored by my pupils, an aurora of blue. It does not end. There are no
outsiders. Only me and the consequence of me.
No escape. Only acceptance.
[…]
I’m coming to learn that I can let that
need slide when it comes to the Exterior. But on the Interior? No. That’s the
realm of tasking memory and overthought. I don’t let anything slide there. That’s
my omnipuzzle, my perplex city, my mind maze. There are much worse things out
there than a hope to understand the self.
[…]
What animacy is there – what soul – when an
object slides down an inclined plane? When a ball bounces? When mechanics gives
a gear the power to turn a cog, a cog a belt, a belt a piston, a piston an iron
limb – in short, can something purely reactionary have a soul? Does a cog have
a soul, or a piston? Does the robotic goliath they drive have a soul?
If we simply follow the choices given us,
reacting to the fear of consequence, do we have souls? Or are we just parts,
spinning in place?
It could be so. Perhaps the only true proof
of existence is in rebel action. Turning backwards or staying still when acted
upon. Refusing the inherent mechanics of the universe.
Ideas like that take flight, and I marvel.
Imagine what it would be like to be in the presence of someone who is not a
reaction. What if everything he/she/it did was the product of an internal mechanism which moved with no
heed to the outside world? Every action, every smile and gesture, would not be
the product of seeing a pretty face or a friend in the crowd, an ex-lover or a
hated enemy – but rather a projection of the Interior onto a blindfold. This
person would treat others as they treat themselves, when scrutinizing their own
mind. This rebel would be able to cut through the mess of human protocol and
find that single most important action that drives the world, and use it not to
be in control, but as an expression of freedom from the control of others.
I long to be that person.
[…]
We
hawk unexpected allies through the need
We
play dangerous realities by striking with flame
Upside
of the razed brush chaos smokes the sky
Truth
is retroform
No
ring will save you
[…]
I’m only ever attracted to the
insubstantial. Not food or even flavour, but ideas like ‘hungry’ or ‘replete’
that are extended to all quarters, warped in aspect until they mean things like
music and books and cinema, and these things become not only ‘as’ essential as
food and sleep, but ‘more’ essential than them. If I were starving in a prison
and given the choice between a meal or a book, the book would sate my most
vital and pressing need. Can’t help it. I’m the sort who’s more tangible the
more intangibly I’m approached.
[…]
I don’t want to vacate, I don’t want fine
dining and an expensive sunset. I want thoughts and ideas and books filled to
the margins with my jagged ink marks and novels read and letters written. I
want to be wherever I am and still be the most important thing that’s there. A
walking landmark. Me.
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