The beach is a special place, a narrow path between heights and depths, created by water.
Precipitous cliffs on the right – concrete, huge, looming their weight makes them feel acute and real, like pain. It’s often said that life is pain – it is, but lasting pain is only an illusion created by the myth of lasting self. But so too is happiness – same logic applies. Avoiding one and chasing after other – a looser’s game. You stop the chase and acquiesce to pain. It lays quiescent and underpins your joy.
Enormous sea on the left – deep, silent, inchoate, seamlessly transforming into sky. Three container ships in undifferentiated sea-sky, like ducks over the fireplace. Familiar, ridiculous and safe, creating anchor point for frightened gaze that’s lost in space and finding you in time – the time of progress.
So you progress – you walk along the beach, twixt depths and heights, abandon and despair, between deficiency and excess, the middle way, the golden mean of Greeks. Temerity-timidity not much to choose between – one consonant, two vowels. The trick is not to chose or compromise but merely to tread between the two, not enter the extremes, keep in the middle, create the path anew with every move.
What you really need is a thin line of firm sand, between loose dry and slippery wet, easier to walk on. Someone to hold by the hand, to not have to look down for solid footing, to see all that beauty.
Extremes are always ugly, beauty is in golden mean, in-sink and in-between, a pattern in complexity, a path that unifies variety and us.
When age is but a litany of loss, your life reduced to sorting through the dross of past achievements, when the age is grim, the time is to become a piligrim.
Pligrim-age, a chance to re-assess priorities, to re-address the mess of habits and regrets and to redress the wounds inflicted on yourself and others by you and mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers – the loved and hated ones, the ones who form you and whom you shape. The people who will mourn you day in and out, as you live and breathe they mourn who you were and what is. What might have been… one can but disappoint while one is living. Death creates a point of no return, no future and no past. No possibility of loss at last. Woebegon – for woe to be gone we stop the clock at death and then move on.
Obituaries are but tales that bend realities into the shape of stories including start, the middle and the end that banishes not sadness, but the worries and when the last uncertainty is gone piligrimage is finished. Life is done.
There is pain aplenty in the past, there is time unmeasured in the future, and the present – rough, uneven suture, tries to form a scar that wouldn’t last…
Choices are difficult. You choose life and passion – of course you do! But there, in the centre, in the shadows and folds, death lurks. Decay of complacency, lack of emotional investment today breeds the boredom of tomorrow, black mold overgrowing your passion, smothering it in a soft, furry blanket, killing it through comfort, illusion of safety, abdication of control… To keep life you have to keep choosing it every day, every hour, every minute. And you do – of course you do – until you tire and let the mold take over.
The open wound is laughing at me. Scarlet lips, glittering teeth of bone deep inside, streaks of blood dulling as they congeal… I laugh back at it, mouth open wide – loudly, victoriously, triumphantly. It is only a flesh wound – I can master it, I can manage it, I can thrive in spite and feel stronger for it. Not like the other ones – dull and habitual aching I feel – the wounds I can’t reach, the wounds I can’t heal, they have nothing they teach – deep under the skin, the wounds closed over.
“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed in seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.“
– J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Elliott
As I walk through the world in the morning, I walk through chores: Brush my teeth, feed my flesh, lift my eyes and observe the world. See the light watch the shadows: frightened and slightly porous It is braving the dark, but the darkness remains unfurled.
Like a puppy, to no avail Light is chasing its own tail. Ceaseless effort – no rest, no sleep Leaves the shadows dark and deep. In the forest, the room, the mind They just move as they hide behind, They never diminish Fade out or finish.
And the dance goes on, like a tide – as it ebbs, it flows. And the mind wanders off, but off what and off when – who knows?
Oh, but time is a funny thing: Lucky – spiral, unlucky – ring; Snake consuming its own tail Has no future, no past, no fail. With no fail comes no gain – no foul. As ouroboros tries to howl It’s unable to rant and rail, Mouth gagged with a scaly tale…
It is time to abandon this train of thought As it leaves us nowhere and profits nought. If I look the look, talk the talk Then I also should walk the walk.
As I wend my way through the virgin wood, All I see are multiple shades of green, All I hear is hue, hue and cry of birds Known just by the sounds – a sight unseen. But my mind gets pulled from the joy sublime Of the sight and sound, the leaves and birds To the stinging nettles that intertwine Unremitting brambles, as sharp as words: “Why the fuck did I wear shorts?”
As I focus on light and sound, I forget to attend to thorns. Joy is found, but also bound By recurrence of cuts and burns. The annoyances and the strain Can be taken away by train.
The train that blurs the near spares far, Serenely cloudscapes through heavens glide. An airplane left antiseptic scar Amid the clouds, stumble on the ride. Landscape renews and we in comfort cruise, But dusty windows engender dusty views.
A patch of lights through clouds gives me joy Untampered, instant and without words. It filters down softly to alloy Itself with shadows in subtle smooth sensations – The joy of pure vision midst the turds Of unremitting complications.
My elasticity declines as I get older – Of skin and time, and arteries, and veins. My hands and feet – they are a little colder Each winter with increase in aches and pains, As well as other relevant increases In colds and flu with snottiness and sneezes. If snake of time contracts then what remains Is an attempt to stretch the space with trains.
Ouroboros of time constricts my breath. As body shrinks my mind expands – and shatters Its dissolution congruent with death But also with infinity of matters. What cannot stretch can break and reassemble. Abandon frame, you all who enter here. Reconstituted, you will still resemble Yourself to others, even those near And dear, them, who try to fix in space Of ageing body time’s dissolving trace.
At the end of the day we arrive. It’s a velvet curtain. The applause increases politely as curtain drops. At the end of the day you are feeling alive and certain. Your heartbeat is apparent to you just before it stops.
