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I feel shamefully adolescent when I post on Xanga, so I will move up in this corporate hierarchical scheme and move to blogger.com. I hope you'll come with me.
http://deslinkitu.blogspot.com
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Whenever he looked off into the distance, he noticed a tingling in his back and a surreptitious urgency writhing in his soul. There was something Romantic about distant sights, how they seemed interminably out of reach yet the spatial plane between it and him was as traversable as him and any other space. He let his eyes outline the tops of mountains and the contours of buildings, the cars and people who were just simple, slowly moving objects that were powerlessly out of his reach. He felt as if he wanted to soar to that distant place, as if he would find something there, as if it were somewhere better than where he was now. That taciturn dreamer, that heavy thinker who's always in a steady submergence into his own thoughts. It was typical for him to be in a crowd and at any given time, become so immersed in his own thoughts that being, existing became something as mundane, monotonous as slowly drying paint in the summer heat. Once he entered those cavernous depths of his mind, returning was no easy endeavor. It was like quicksand, where everything that happened to him, anyone who spoke to him, only caused him to sink more. Could it be the legacy of a wallflower? Perhaps he needed it; the world might have been too much for him to handle without the voluptuous buffer of his easily congealing, quickly coagulating thoughts. If the sensory experiences of his day-to-day life could, from being sensed and perceived, instantly make their way into becoming an impression of the soul, he may as well as have gone mad from the speciousness of life -- the lack of significance in the face of all this spontaneity. Perhaps all he would care about then would be living a "comfortable life" in this world of self-definition, where we invent words and means sheerly for the sake of securing impregnable comfort so absolute that it disconnects us from true interaction, real passion, and Aristotelian virtue. Unfortunately, or fortunately perhaps, for him, the sensations of this world never have a direct pathway to his soul. No, they are caught in layers and layers, levels beyond levels of cobwebs that materialize with more self-reflection, contemplation, and observation. These cobwebs latch on to anything that he senses, other than perhaps the most powerful images, like suffering and pain, and become projects for the intricacies of his mind to mull and consume entirely. In spite of all of this he didn't really know who he was; identity became a faint image he witnessed only during winks of intermittent dozing: a child staring into a pond and nodding off, a dog lying on cool concrete and being cradled by the gentle reverberations of the busily passing people. That distance, that heavy and cumbersome distance, reflected him as if he were staring into a mirror. He traced it with his fingertips and gently wept as he thought of W.P. Inman and how much they were the same. The wallflower, that quiet and graceless thing, comes and goes as both an object of fascination and a deep, profound repellent.
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His thoughts weigh a
ton. He moves in and out of focus at will, when in a single moment he'll be
both blurred and defined, precisely in contrast but entirely out of focus. He's
slow moving, reacts minutes later, and feels only when the stimulus is gone. He's
the one-time flaneur that left more than two decades ago but never returned to
complete the journey. The steps he's
taken have been erased by time and the cold reality of historicity. He's
dissipating particle by particle into the sweet surrender of existential calm.
Beat.
Blank walls and
empty canvas bags, the rich and luxuriant smell of rubbery leather couches, and
the scent of herbal shampoos. The feeling of cold tile on morning feet. What
was he feeling? …something is wrong.
It's like this:
He's in a pasture of
endless green, the leaves of grass and vegetation extending so that they gently
scrape his fingertips. A sensation so subtle and indiscreet that it brings him
immediately to his childhood, when there was nothing but somniferous warmth and
emotions as light as balloons soaring relentlessly in breathtaking skies
(simply for the sake of doing so). He walked down this pasture and nothing else
was in view except the overwhelming beauty of everything that stretched before
him and the fact that he didn't bother trying to understand any of it. He felt
a security from what he knew before, what he was before, so he closed his eyes
and let the sun shine through his eyelids so that the fleshy red of light
emanating through skin overtook him entirely. That beautiful shade of red that
was beyond imitation because it was a sublime moment experienced when the
senses and mind close while the heart opens. He hung his head back and became
part of everything there: the brightly shining sun, the playful pebbles
placidly strewn below his feet, the swooning green moving organically back and
forth, and the majestic scent of overwhelming life that he didn't owe to but
became instead. This intense moment of security washed over him and he felt
that he could walk without sensing anything because nothing would harm him but
he wouldn't miss anything because the intensity of the scene was only amplified
by the sheer muscle of his imagination. He felt a connection to the place that he
knew only so infrequently before, and he relished everything about -- though he
understood not a single bit of it. He could have very well been swept away by
the wind, and even if this place was poisonous to the sinful presence of
humans, the complex imperfection of our beings, he didn't mind because in these
instances he felt not one in and of himself, he didn't feel whole a priori, but one of something bigger than
what his body dictated was the definition of him.
Beat.
He felt as if his
lungs collapsed under its own weight. He clutched at his chest and tried to
beat back some normalcy into it. He opened his eyes but everything was still
black.
Beat.
Vision flooded back
into him and to his relief, everything was the same. His demons, for once,
didn't overtake him.
Beat.
The green began to
wither into a gilded gold. The sky rotted and became as grey as cigarette
smoke. A suffocating stench wafted through so perfunctorily and with an
unbelievable puissance that his reaction was as palpable as if he were
bayoneted in the side. It began to rain slightly acidic and his thoughts boiled
into venom. Like a past lover come to haunt him again, or old wounds reopened,
he handled it the only way he knew how. He stopped and opened his arms and
embraced what would be the only leitmotif that he could ever know, that,
perhaps, he chose to know. It had no name, no face, no objective. He believed
that he could be free from it, free it like some freak foundling that he
stumbled upon in a bildungsroman that ended in a puppet show, which,
facetiously began to characterize his life. He didn't know what he was feeling.
What was he feeling? …something was wrong.
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Last night came and
went in a blaze and all it left was an impression a smile. In an instant, those
who I knew only by name impersonated a specious camaraderie that I didn't know
how to interpret. The liquor helped me be the perfectly despicable deipnosophist
and the insignificance of me was voluminous in that moment of soaring
meaninglessness. I had one of those moments when I witnessed myself in all my
dilapidated glory and grew restive at the sight, to the point where it swelled
inside of me like a rising venom that
percolated in a way most sinister. I think I'm getting exhausted. It's a
exhaustion that's inside-out, coating me with a fatigue of mind and soul. I'm
lying supine, gaping at the sky with pits for eyes, the ultimate anti-hero.
Unless I extirpate this black blood then I fear that laughter will only ring
hypocrisy. I think myself to sleep every night and in my dreams I don't know
who I am or why I matter. I've been stuck on this existential problem for
almost a decade and the immensity of it is somniferous. It's so sublime that
when I try to pick up where I left off I can only progress a microscopic
distance before I fall asleep from my exhausting confusion. This Cartesian
sleep has me wound up under two tons of mental anguish, where simple
consciousness radiates an enervating guilt so immense and complete that
identity becomes an illusion and I blow away at the gentlest breeze. But I'm human, I'm solid. I have weight and
form so I'm always here. There should be some kind of significance, as it's all
too real to be something that means nothing.
My thoughts hector me into submission and I lose all grasp of reality
until I'm forced to retreat into my neat, little fictional world. Under all
this twisted form, I construct a stoic breastplate that repels the world. I've
comported to the extra weight. I'm a gnarled tree trunk. I'm a thousand
whispers sent hopelessly across silent seas and a flower toiling under a desert
sun. I'm a blinking light bulb in its final flickers of function. I'm a child's
hand sending quiet ripples on a surface of a still pond.
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A maelstrom in my
mouth, a storm in my mind incarnate, I spittle subterranean secrets and wonder
where they're all from. I dreamt of a tiger last night prowling on the ocean
floor. What remarkable depth. It patrolled back and forth, swiping at the fish
who came near it to observe this new situation. It can't see in the water, so
it embraces the fact that sight is illusion and we're figments of a perfervid
fantasy of a child known only by name. When I walk up the steps I resonate a
million miles around until I'm floating in my own conceit. This lyrical mess of
tangled cables blinds my eyes so I only see trees and not a forest. I walk
circles around Shinchon station to realize that I'm back where I started and
that I haven't moved an inch. My, oh my, the day that the drizzling skies
represents the cracks in my walls I'll know that when I sleep and dream of shit
to become all the richer for it. I turn the volume up on this stereophonic
sound until the bass is engraved in my eardrums and I radiate music like muscle
memory. The curtain drops when people only begin to see -- with all this velvet
red we forget to remember what's happening to those who are already dead by
famine and abuse, exploitation and neglect. I'm standing in a crater so deep
that when I speak the voices come crashing back at me. This phenomenological
bowl that we live in, this intergalactic circularity that persuades me with the
same poison that she's the one for me. I snap a thousand tunes at once and hum
in reverse like a room full of Turing machines calculating the perfect
logarithm for secrecy. What a world, what a world. I think in 360. We're
ceaselessly in motion and collide repetitively. The connect-the-dots of
existence, when I run into you I take a piece of you and when you run into me,
I lose a part of me. My dreams are becoming realer than reality.
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