Category: Subservience to a Color of the Brain

“I’ll follow you with my fascinated mind into this trip to darkness, and I promise to make sure you glimmer like a night in Budapest, as I collide with the dramas of harvesting my melancholy and searching for happiness. Are you ready?
Before we go, remember to warm your heart, and balloon past the mountainous landscape and map each voyage as you set sail to lands above. There’s nothing I can say and there’s not more you can do. You glisten in a bell jar, and pandemonium breaks loose in my mind sometimes, so remember to collect me too. I will deliver everything you gifted to me onward the grounds I touch, the islands I discover, the truths I unravel, and the threads I stitch with time into a sweater to fit the blustery weather on my way back, alone. Now, there’s sun and an ocean, we can spend days in canyons, and have waterfront conversations, and end our days, our sojourn in another life, lying on a hard ground, scattered, not because of being lost, but because of being everywhere, because we covered a distance beyond white light, and we’ll tie silk-roots to the skirts of the earth, and we’ll set a bow-tie which comically strangles our mismatched outfits, and our mismatched world.
It’s cold. I’m cold. But I will set you amid disco-balls, not LED’s, no normal thought, carnival Ferris-wheels will spin you to Malibu, and I will be there soon, as fast as an airplane can get me, or I’ll just learn to surf past the coast of Biarritz and trace the same fall to forever as yours. I’ll endure this cataclysmic heartbeat because I guess it’s only symptomatic of our infatuation with being alive, and making mistakes, darting thru abruptly by windows in sleds, silver-tinsels tied in the hair, always jumping, and talking. I’m filled with visions of us.”

---

In the silence this echoed
across the membrane of a
fractured planet, seeking
faultlines of restlessness.
Choosing a mood that suits
my hobo clothes to disguise
the rays of prohibited hues 
~David Redpath. 

I reached a place, high-rise buildings, crowded roads, and the clanking of beer bottles in a bar for the footloose, neo-maturity that clicks tongues at the prick of a metallic bottle cap, bleed a little drip of body, suck it in like red-velvet smoothies, and dream the mystery of their next hour, and the following one.

A watchman wears last night’s tiredness on his face, and probably thinks of salvaging broken bulbs, or a château made out of memorial concrete and high hopes iced on bricks. The bartender is pinky humming in his old reflection on the chiselled glasses, suspicious of tomorrow. Amidst the young groups, one is brooding whether what surrounds him is in reality his reality. Girl in crazy denim shorts, long hair, eyeliner, Guns N Roses top, singing and dancing in her head, searching for ways to manifest that as truth, nails painting the counter during their jangling of contemplative uniqueness, shifting, crashing with heavy-metal flowers dangling on her ornamented ear lobe. Then someone gleams with tears in a distance, head bowed, surrounded by smiling people, my stare fixates to check the resolution of this intrigue. People are laughing, person is tearing up. Until he tilts his head, bobs left ten degrees, shakes his head, and uncontrollably hits the table to sound something because his laughs don’t have enough chord closure to resonate, it does only in wheezes, and exasperated coughs.

So, maybe they’re all just tired, because sometimes sadness just isn’t meant to be thought about, and it doesn’t occur, not simply because of the absence of happiness, but because they aren’t primary emotions, aren’t directive of humanity, and life, or dreams, it’s like they show in posters, and on Netflix- entertainment is layered in colors, silence, and endless swims in the divides of water between continental borders, travelling and drowning simultaneously because of floating/sinking on a trailer park- an insane, but imaginable vehicle on liquid packets of existence.

Today, I settled by the verge of the bed, searching for a resolution or any new substance to the poems that had been scribbled on dry fresh-wipes, and stored in a box with a roll of sheets containing old handwritings of literature tucked beside, held in the clutch of a friendship band that colorfully wriggles. Now that I read it, it hardly qualifies as literature and I read it now with downier eyes, eyelids drowsy in a young haze. The footloose howls of experience, heading a closing verve alongside the dark margins that are festooned by new recognitions, and regrets, and wistful thinking that perfects a deception of marveling traits, and sparks a chain of events and sequences, which are reminiscent of hill rides, and souvenir gift shops. ‘Whoosh’ goes a sheet out of a hand slippery with spilt milkshakes, and the sole of the shoe on which it falls has been deranged by mud from the rocky beach of Portofino, and has kissed the cold of Moscow. I think a little dream of people, happy people, and old men raging on their roaring lounge chair, aching, breaking, falling down, darkness hiding the double floors out of which they storm, like in a noir movie. We’re all in a game together, and some of us look highly at the lights, some stares stay level to each other’s, and I bet on everything, teething behind a sofa, legs swept off, imagining all that lives forever or dies trying, and perishes in a race to the quilting move of sand by a beach, or a gliding, innocent pebble dropped at the tip of a pulpit mountain, toward an abyss, going endlessly in the tunnel of a body, onward and on, forever and ever.

It’s a pretty day, warm…

A desolate cycle of aeroplane chimes above in the sky, amidst clouds cooling on the calm of the hazy moonlight, and skateboarders settle at the edge of the pier, rolling joints, while the night is gored by the glimmer of red neon dive bars. And I watch a car flirting with the traffic lights, blinking in and out on the metallic pole, winking one by one in romantic rhythms.

The city is all but a silhouette, and the sea erases it hips, and brings out the neck with a killing anticipation of advocating life against the art. The air slips in the gaps between the wet wooden floors, cracked with time that went begetting change, and besetting visions, it hides someplace for me to breathe in while I’m still in lonesome stasis, and while I am still in the cover of glowing lampshade, reading a novel that series the name of despondency, fetishizing the senses with honey-colored memories that echo in a sequence of sadness unique to pensively wrought minds.

I see that the room wants to keep me, and the breeze wants to breathe me. I can almost feel the free hold, as my soul rambles thru the fashionable show rooms, and storefronts, coasting down in inescapable kiosks selling fruits, and juices, guns and roses. Or as I sit away at a desk writing what I read, the dim dark falling over my head. All the while, whistling, thinking about what I saw from the balcony, and then swiveling in the chair, still thinking. Thinking.

This is an interruption from regular programming. I feel a powerful need to show my affection and respect for one of my favorite books ever- Catch 22. So, bear with me thru a coarse course of unadjusted and broken academia infused by drunken poetics. 😋

In the book there’s no linear plot, there is only a timeline. It’s set in World-War 2 and not built against its weakening and tapering downward the end, but when Americans occupied Italy, and the war roared still. A bunch of crazy soldiers who dissociate into a multi-character narrative are bound in tight continuity, as they struggle to keep themselves in what seems like a losing game, nit for their country but they themselves. The protagonist can be Yossarian. A funky-women crazed-friendly-disco minded- and tired bombardier who lives his life under the expansive shadow of innumerable eccentric characters, and every connection he sparks with any is just a pleasure to read.

Catch-22 works so well under so many moods and it captured so many feelings. It’s always funny but with undertones of politics, and death, and poignancies. Multiple scenes do an amazing job of capturing something, which wavers like a cloudily fluffed beard that the sky wears as the sun wiggles itself down in burnished vigor. I’ve had so many happy times with that book, it was one great month after another, and it was one waste after a splash of bigger realizations.

There are two scenes that stand out to me, and I hope to express it in a way that is able to be sensed by all. And I can only try..

1. The Soldier that Saw Everything Twice. Yossarian is in the hospital with only one other soldier in his room. This soldier sees everything twice, and owing to some natural insanity and impulse, Yossarian soon makes the same claim. The doctors believe him (it’s a novel, you can’t be cautious all the time about logic). The greatest part is here on; the soldier dies, and Yossarian is asked by a stranger doctor to pretend to be him, so that the dead soldier’s family can have a proper goodbye. “We’re all in this business of illusion together”, the doctor says in tones of damp darkness, and with grains of cigarette ashes fired as specks from his lips into sickening air. Yossarian complies in minor worry, troubled by the chances of truth and what he would have if there was an expose on his falsifications. The doctor knew, and he promised to not ostracize anything to fulfill his chance of getting his way. A hardly baffled and only disgruntled in inexpressive pretense Yossarian lays still on the hospital bed, as shades are drawn, and the lights dim and his eyes become reflective of what he will have to feel in the backwash of the upcoming encounter. The family looks at Yossarian, and they accept his name as Yossarian, they accept that they may have forgotten their son in the long absences inside each other’s existence. They talk, and its unimportant. Until they lash out on the man up above, heeling the world on the galaxy’s edge, and punishing young, innocent soldiers who were only born to serve their countries. “Ma, make him feel good” says the brother. And she asks him to dress warm before sunrise.

A few words later the father says “Soon, you’re going to die” He makes Yossarian promise to tell the man up above, about how unforgiving the people down below are at his tyrannical will, he makes him promise once and twice. And the mother asks him to dress warm, and she seems to know something about it.

To me this showed a side of death, that you get to experience in another body, in another mind, and it doesn’t belong to you, and you don’t even want it in the first place, but you see it- there is a place for you, when you’re not anywhere, and that place is only the final moment, where you have to remember to be comfortable, because the drinks all day, and the talks that extinguish at the grope of a tight handle, will only resonate for a second, and that too in a second far away.

• The second is pretty simple, I guess you need to read the book to actually understand it. A friend of Yossarian’s, or maybe only a sheer colleague dies during a mission. Yossarian, as a form of subconscious protest and soulful rebellion, states that he may never wear a uniform again. And so, he marches nakedly thru the camp, with a distinguished chest, and a look indifferent to funny glares. In heat drenched memories he attempts to recognize and recall the deceased. Then he climbs up a tree, during sundown, and he watches his funeral. He just watches it. Doesn’t stir up any emotion, doesn’t gravitate the weight that grazed the fields of sadness that rippled out of the speculation of loss, and its consequential happening. Then an actual friend who has made a mistake with his syndicate, which has brought him to a loss for the first time in his trade, settles besides Yossarian, fully dressed I his olive-clad uniform and discusses the business. Yossarian releases words out of his mouth, and his friend from his, and they have what may be called a conversation. So, where did their thoughts fly, somewhere in the warmth of distance, or in the craze of ignorance. They disappeared majorly in a fanciful notion or an abstract speech of formality that is borderline okay.

Something about this just whispers and grabs me in direct, honest, capable community. I don’t know how else to be descriptive about something quite so crucial. A subjectivity intersects us at various readings of our often scripted lives, or the shadowy escape of books, movies, and songs, which are indulgent in serotonin producing embraces. Nothing quite buried me to sleep on nights homeless in the array of scattered thoughts, as the carefully cut clarity of this book.

There it is. Off I went.

“There’s a fountainhead inside of my mouth, and all the times words break loose, my mind rambles thru the wildness of this world. I travel thru dimensions engraved in cemeteries and embedded in our embryonic beginnings, but that’s only an explanation. I have no real cause, I have only a dream. And much of what I see, most of what I catch has only had truth building in findings over time, slowly, growing out to be a fatter, more fulfilling sandwich of all the events that led to a sane pretense- as my front. What do I show, and what do I mean, and to what people, at what costs. These thoughts get no one nowhere, and nothing compares to that quality of time to push wave after wave and high water, right thru the open lips, in a revolutionary splash, and spasm after spasm forcing the making of swimming strokes. And this life feels endless, sometimes, and on good days and dark nights, it seems to close, just awaiting sunrise.
What I mean may be lost and disarrayed when released into the difference of crowds that aren’t an audience. But it’s betrayal really, that we scatter over matter, and hardly get to sink completely within ourselves. We do the best we can, to curl, and to curve into corners, sense the second-hand wind that blows in thru the west sides, taken in recesses before, by others-strangers and future or past acquaintances, even celebrities. As indulgent as this seems, it helps. But there aren’t enough moments to keep, so many waste away, since we have so many things to collect and we have so many hatches to bury, simply to end up in a better position. Above all we have to create many attachments and connections to distribute like sweet candy pre- the dusk of our era. That’s just what being a person is. Be a good person.
Because there are nails on fingertips that can scratch the finest Mercedes, and there are words that can bruise even diamond skulls, there are storms that take oceans in a swirl and sway them across the harbors, onward the cities, crashing buildings, crossing them with one another, flooding lungs and hindering heart-beats, hunting love and storing it in heart-shaped boxes. And seconds fall into constellations that divide with memories into nano-seconds, while washing you to the sidewalks in aquatic defeat forever.”

Space is this tiny interlude, between the choices, and the love-threads. But somehow, somewhere along these misty aeons, you create dangerously meaning that can substantiate your shadow and transform it into a dream, that you can change, and that you might never have to run away from, simply chase till other turns. And thru the incidents that show so many trails, and a judgment at crucial cruxes of swinging time, you’ll summit upon a place, upon a grief in the nights to foresee the great phases. Discovering sparks, and eyes that glimmer in the blue apocalypse.  

An apocalypse, where the sky is asphyxiated by an array of destructive planes, and the vengeance darts in thru openings in the sky, and the guns are shot inward, and the crowds dither and wither and run, while their arms get mangled in each other’s. But to each his own, and so many fall within a district of influences, and those feelings rise only inside of you- perched on a lifeguard stand… The clouds float loudly thru islands of mud, and bodies share and sell themselves in an audition, an attempt to free the captivity, over the sounds of the flat-broke-down minutes, crossed with a funereal submission.

These events that occur in your head in unstable surrounding, become descriptive of all the things you are. There’s no cure for a diseased soul, and no fix for becoming, no highway thru this hell, no separate table to transform mundane water into cherry-cola, there’s a whole lot of nothing amid a vinyl library of troubles.

A library lined with bulleted shelves wearing shades of gloom, and accommodating personality traits, pages of pessimism from an anthology of despondence fly loosely and stick to the head. Some shelves dangle with books of good memories and feelings that stick out in the new load troubles that unleash into limited yet liminal space. And the video camera faces you for your message, your momentous love song, your wooden laments, and your anguish all dolled up in a blank recorder that spans decades of lifetime.