exercise in caving in

I want to collapse. Walking home from work, late at night, with the stars beating out a restless compass behind the clouds and streetlamps, and the flood of red and gold bleeding from piles in the gutters into puddles of decayed parchment on the streets, the loathsome rot of ginko berries crushed underfoot like dog shit or sexual frustration. There will be a sudden gust of wind, the face of a friend gliding ghostlike by on the whir of a bicycle, a song heard with such deep emotional undertones that it sunk into my bones and lays there a melancholy twang for each love lost, each moment slipped through cut fingers. And falling into that depression like an old well I’ll be unable to take another step, and if it weren’t for the force of habit drilled into these limbs I would stop completely and sit down overwhelmed on a cracked porch. Or tumble directly into the leaves with the fingers worn out of my gloves and overcoat grunged and melting into the reek of the street. On these days I feel like a bum or one of those crazies who are already lost in their own worlds, who have no need left for society, to hold together that face that was always caving in for other people and leaves them mumbling incoherently in the edges of vision or back tables of cafés. One wonders what realms they have vanished to behind those ill-fitting masks.

I lay down and pull the night over my head like a thick winter blanket to ward off the nightmares and wonder that I have managed to make anything of my life so far. Just a few copied poems, a couple unreleased demos, no degrees, years wasted on the clock making wings and sandwiches, a bare minimum of friends I can still only vaguely relate to. I have had too many dreams and not enough follow-through. Each time I begin with the full intention to create great works of art, lasting relationships, I trip up and collapse mid-sentence into the hairy arms of lethargy and despair. Even this never ending novel, which haunts me each night for years now, lurking even through the day. All the effort I seem to put to it produces maybe an hour or two of results occasionally. The rest is spent lost in that world wondering how I might get out, or get it out of my head. For that’s it, if I was just content to dream and falling through that city of symbols wander aimlessly and mesmerized and never wake up, It’s not the dreams that haunt me, but the desire and effort needed to articulate them. The force of mountains.

It would be easy to get lost, to become one with the bums. That’s why I haven’t stopped yet, for if I collapsed, laid down just for a moment to rest in the raw emotions of the gutter, I might never get back up. I would live there pecking crumbs with the pigeons until moss grew on my coat and my shoes stretched roots into the concrete and perhaps countless years later I would make a good tree stump for someone else to rest their mind on. That would not be such a horrible fate, a stump serves at least some useful service.

But no! I must keep moving. Those lights in the windows are beckoning me to sit, to spell the interplay of shadows through the bare branches, and if I do so I’m finished. I must keep moving, as far and as fast as possible, before this entropy kills me, the atrophy of each daily routine, each stale lead-bound instinct, creeps into my bones and freezes them in mid-fall. That is what I struggle against, the ruts worn so deep in the sidewalk from each and every walk this same way, that there is nowhere left to tread and the caving concrete collapses over my head, my grave eventually marked by some illegible and inappropriate scrawl left by some equally bored vagabond not yet submitted to his own tomb.

I have considered alternatives, racked my brain on ways to extricate myself from these aching streets. A change, of work, of going back to school, of building some career for myself here. And yet I fear it would not be enough, that I’ll still be here walking these same streets for even longer duller years, caught in just as much of a habit in all the meaningless work that would require. Not that I feel I couldn’t do it, but why? I am sick of habits. I am sick of being sick of habits. I grow nauseous at the very idea of having to get up again.

Perhaps I should learn to fly instead, escape entirely to some foreign country where I have no habits, where everything is as of yet still unknown, even myself, and I can look in the mirror and see an infinite number of new lives to lead each morning in this new and breathtaking place. I will ex-patriate, go live in Paris. I have always felt I belonged there for all its history of literary existentialists. I will sit at the cafes on the sidewalk, write furiously, and look at everything, and dream as often as possible. It sounds idyllic, but how long would that last before habit caught up with me again and I grew bored and listless and ready for another chang? One month, two? Perhaps a whole year if I really pushed myself to explore each and every alleyway before they too become mapped onto the veins on the back of my hands. And then what? I could go everywhere and even grow bored of going (as I already am), and still not find peace. I would have to leave the Earth altogether, chart the depths of the stars from my dreaming mind, wander a nomad from galaxy to galaxy until I come to the unknown edge of the Universe, and even that would not be enough to contain me. I shudder at the mere notion of immortality, what could fill it?

Better to abandon that plan and just lock myself in my room, where lying curled on my bed with a cat nosing at my elbow I can descend to the inner edges of the mind. The psych has no known bottom, no final borderline, no accurate maps except those still marked with the winds blowing cherub-like in the four corners and fantastic beasts prowling the seas where they fall off the sides and drown infinity. Here be dragons. If only I can get back to my room without collapsing first. Perhaps there will be a dragon on the way (that would be something), perhaps one must finally accept boredom and reality and grow accustomed of amusing oneself in whatever manner available until you die, occasionally amusing others as well in the process. If that is the case than hopefully the hours spent on this have not been in vain.


[this was written a few days ago in a stressful weekend of falling apart]

street of dreams

"I do not know just how in childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense of the world crystallizes for us... They are meanings that seem predestined for us, ready and waiting at the very entrance of our life... Such images constitute a program, establish our soul's fixed fund of capital, which is alloted to us very early in the form of inklings and half-conscious feelings. It seems to me that the rest of our life passes in the interpretation of those insights, in the attempt to master them with all the wisdom we acquire, to draw them through all the range of intellect we have in our possession. These early images mark the boundaries of an artist's creativity. His creativity is a deduction from assumptions already made. He cannot now discover anything new; he learns only to understand more and more the secret entrusted to him at the beginning, and his art is a constant exegesis, a commentary on that single verse that was assigned him. But art will never unravel that secret completely. The secret remains insoluble. The knot in which the soul was bound is no trick knot, coming apart with a tug at its end. On the contrary, it grows tighter and tighter. We work at it, untying, tracing the path of the string, seeking the end, and out of this manipulation comes art..."

and

"The Demiurge has had no monopoly on creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits. Matter has been given infinite fertility, inexhaustible vitality, and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation which invites us to create as well. In the depth of matter, indistinct smiles are shaped, tensions build up, attempts at form appear. The whole of matter pulsates with infinite possibilities that send dull shivers through it. Waiting for the life-giving breath of the spirit, it is endlessly in motion. It entices us with a thousand sweet, soft, round shapes which it blindly dreams up within itself."

-Bruno Schulz, author of "The Street of Crocodiles"