Thursday, June 28, 2007

Trip Mckenzie and the Interjection Pages.


Opening the book, somewhere in the vicinity of page that I had reached. It lays on the desk, spread inappropriately: spine bent, binding loose and indecorous. Such provocative behaviour from this supposed tome of learning. I am nauseated. I reach out to shut it close again.

I cannot bring myself to touch the pages. I stare at it, I hope with an expression of reproach. I have the feeling that the book is unbothered. Neither its permanent nature or present state are such as to care.

Such unusually salacious behaviour from this book, my companion for some weeks now, not once has it hinted at this obscene playfulness. I wonder. What is it about these pages that it has fallen upon? Why this new behaviour? What words lie there, bringing about this change?

Forcing the bile and arousal deep into my stomach I lean forward. Peer intently, objective and disattached. A scientist studying a curious new bug. I shall not engage with the words on that page, my intention is to categorize, classify. A purely scientific examination. One in which literature, art, feeling and emotion have no place. By this I shall resist its allure.

The pages laugh at me. These dark characters spore further, tentacles grasp my vision, fasten to my mind. They pull. I go down. Deep and dark.

Lightning strobes, sight periodically. Blink out, recede into the black. Everything drummed in stellar light. Flash of endless heaven. Stark and terrible. Empty and pure. Absolution.

Concrete reality reboots, restores.

Leaning upon the single metal bar, spanning the door space in the wall. Elbow juts out, chin on wrist. I look into the alley. Lost in thought, thinking of nothing. Alarm bell ringing a constant. Rain tap dance the street. The walls. Sky dark, heavy, bright and clear. Glass reflection. I feel the sea extend endlessly around the world. Vast and powerful its serenity, peace. I smell the mountain peaks, storm breeze a faintest echo of winds that dance through summit and snow. I stand upon a glacier, magnificent shining resplendently in golden sun. Ancient and endless. Epochally I surf the ice. Circumventing the earth and the ages of the world.

The pages of my notepad flutter, the rain picks up, drops into sheets and then waves. Ground lashed clean, memory of the days washed away. Light shifts spectrum, a temporary hue, a moment shorn off the world.

My head lifts, sit up straight, eyes wide, dilate.

Internalize and eternalize.

The book, inanimate now, devoid of personality and character. As it always was.

Monday, June 25, 2007

Trip Mckenzie and the Great Barrier Language.

(wrote this a while ago, in lieu of anything better though I thought I would put it up. It is not written creatively or well, but I find the ideas quite interesting. More to the point my brain is not functioning right now, so I thought to kick start it a little by going over some stuff...)


I realised just now that I hate language.

By its nature language is a system of pre-conceptions, past exceptions, rules and regulations. In the interest of communication we conceptually limit ourselves. To describe a day's experiences we employ a barrage of references and descriptions of previous experience. These are not even our own.

If I say 'tree' I am referring to the thing that is a tree, except I use a word that is not my own creation, not my own reaction experiencing the object to which I refer. Up to a point this is a remarkably convenient means of communication. Generally speaking our collective experiences of trees are likely to be very similar. So by accepting the word tree as our universal label for those similar experiences we are able to easily translate our experiences to one another.

Yet none of our experiences of even something as concrete and common as a tree are likley to be identical. So that when we accept the label 'tree' for our own experience and concept we also assent to a sacrifice of something unique to our perception of reality. This is where language begins to frustrate.

Fir f we wabt ti express our own unique concept of anything, to represent in language our own instinctive reaction to experience, we must turn to this other and past defined system of description. Whilse 'tree' when first uttered may have entirely captured the feelings, thought and perception of its speaker, it cannot be the same for us. But if we were to utter to someone our own instinctive verbal/vocal interpretation they would surely not understand. Inevitably, to explation our meaning we would once more have to return to the accepted term 'tree' and then add further explanation of what the object inspires in us.

Add every other word and the structure of our expression is the same as that first one. To pinpoint exactly our own experience we fall further and further into complexity. Simply because if we were to utter the simplest most natural expression, no-one would understand nor would they be likely to seek to understand.

And this is all just for a simple reference to a common object...

Aparat from a literary exercise we are unlikely to have any great desire to share our unique interpretation of 'tree experience'. Appart from a certain sadness at this loss empathy, we can accept efficient communication as a preferable pay-off.

When it comes to an abstract idea, concept, emotion or feeling, however, the frustrating limitations of language become never-ending and irresistable. With its base sacrifice of expression in favour of communication, language in fact becomes a remarkably inefficient tool.

A picture tells a thousand words only because peope are prepared to descipher the nature of the picture, however abstract it may be. The same with music, dance, visual art. We accept our own emotional response as our guide to the expression of the artist's experience.

Present a book of abstract scribblings which are your own unique written expression of experiences and be branded insane.

At a push we can insert made up words and sounds into our chosen language to express something we otherwise cannot find the words for. Admit that no words are your own experiences, substitute the whole language for a book of your own creations - that is entirely unacceptabe.

As we reach to greater complexity or uniqueness in our discourse of ideas we embrace the most efficient tool in the interest of communication. But it is this very efficiency which is the flaw in that method, since it is this which pushes us to ever greater complexity.

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Friday, June 15, 2007

I drift in void.
Orbiting a vast amorphous bubble of space.
Star clouds float, deep below its skin.

On occasion one floats closer. To crash and break against the impenetrable surface tensions. Explosion, magnificent spectrum. Light cascades across my awestruck face. Eyes widen at the beauty of it.

Creation, destruction, all of it before me.
This is the ideal of existence.

My path takes me further around the surface.
I see new shapes take form.
Impossible to describe, their geometry denies my perception. Existing as concepts in my eyes.
I realise. I am seeing other dimensions, universes.
This bubble contains so much more than my reality.

I reach out, desperate to pierce the film that separates me from the all. Fingers outstretched, comically insufficient. I will my nails to grow, joints to break, skin to stretch. Will in vain. It is beyond me.

I drift. Away now. Void envelopes. The bubble diminishes into nothing. Only the sheen of its surface shifting remains.

Where does the light come from I wonder.

Everything is black now. My eyes close, what difference is there.

Explosions, climax, release. The stars are inside me. Rushing from my mind, crash against retina. Violent, chaotic creation. Eyelids are torn apart. Eyeballs burst into space, grey matter sucked into the vacuum.

The bubble has broken. Surface tension lost, more than could ever be contained.

Everything, the all, rockets towards me. A stream of existence in all its possibilities. A pear propelled into my hollowness.

Pouring in, filling me. Saturation, destruction. I dissolve into the all. My body, soul, nature, disparated into something infinitely greater. Total.

Bonds reassert. Forces exert. Coalescence, cohesion return. Surface tension restored. The bubble is complete.

I orbit the centre. Looking out,the void is barely perceivable, refracted by shifting of the inner film. Looking in, to the centre. The epitome, the essential. Inconceivable.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Trip Mckenzie and the power of his hands.

Get the fuck away from me.


Stars traverse my fingers,

Fingers over eyes.

Eyes filling with stars.


That is what I hope for at least.

Get the fuck away from me and let me fill my head with stars.


A head filled with the cosmos,

All that there is vast held between the walls of my skull.

Everything inside.

Left outside only what is not.


Not a part of everything.


But instead, you continue to be there.

Blocking my star flow.

Maintaining the emptiness inside my head.

Whilst everything, outside, distant, apart.


You, I hate you.

Your hands covering my eyes.

Not protecting me, hiding me.

Ashamed, afraid.

Worse.

Disinterested.


Disinterested in my emptiness.

Disinterested in their surfeit of existence.

Disinterested in all and nothing.


Can't you tell that I want to be alone.

Alone as a part of all.

Get the Fuck away from me.


Remove your fingers from in front of my eyes.

I see now. There are no stars to be found in them.

Those were just the first flashes of blindness.


Blind to though, feeling, inspiration and beauty.

The great numb blind.


I might say the words, understand me.

I might say those words.

Beg, plead, pray for numbness.

Bt there is no sincerity.

They only reach so far, never so deep as my heart.

My heart cries out 'love or bust'

It rejects you nihlism and I adore it for that.

It embraces the futitily of it all and runs with it.

As far as it can.


When it falls down it whispers to futility, held tight in its arms

'You can be anything you want. You can be hope, joy, prpose, life. Everything.'


Take my fingers away from my eyes.

There is no need to hide, I can be anything I want.

I can be the stars, I can be everything.


Come back to me.





Saturday, May 26, 2007

Trip Mckenzie and the titleless drivel

One of the convenient side-effects of the search for greatness is its diversionary power. You aim for something higher than the sky and you can pretend not to notice anything underneath it.
Your intellectually defined goal of soulful fulfillment allows you to ignore the emotions your heart begs to feel.
This is hardly transcendence, as I said, it is merely diversion. The aim is noble, but this path is not right. Greatness must encompass and be achieved through the same pains and joys which plague the mundane life. They should be felt even more keenly, with greater intensity: pain as much as joy. This greatness is an emotional state, whatever the intellects position in that state, emotions cannot be discarded - they are also it value.

Eyes are teary.
Staring blankly, eternity.
Middle finger hanging on pinky, holding me together.
Feet up, knees as if clutched.
One physical state to be replaced by another.

(this was my attempt to describe something in plain language, with the idea of telling a story in nothing but description and emotion, with no plot to speak of. I gave up straight away, creativity is not with me right now. If you listen to Springtime by Jeffrey Lewis he does it perfectly with about ten words and a guitar.)

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Monday, May 21, 2007

Trip Mckenzie and the perfect gathering.

I have been trying to imagine the perfect social occasion.
Driving in my car, returning from a show that never happened, nostalgia for days of my youth hitting me in the face as I travel along the dark tree lined roads of those days. I recall an excitement and a spirit of adventure that accompanied every such drive, no matter what the occasion I would be filled with expectation of the grand and magnificent events that might just possibly occur that evening. Or the beautiful, intimate moments that I might experience.

Now my head is constantly overflowing with jumbled ideas of great artistic achievement, human evolution, purity of experience. I question whether there is any worthwhile reason to engage in anything which is not pure experience and so I find myself doubting that there is any worth to any art or act of creativity. But without it how does the human race progress, how does it evolve into something greater than the stagnant state of society now.

I imagine an answer to be found in a collision of these ideas. Acts of wild unbounded creativity enacted purely as experience pushing its participants with every manifestation to a new and better place. In my head this collision of ideas is only possible through the collision of people - evolution of an individual is not the same as evolution of the individual.

Yet every gathering of people around creative reasons always seems to devolve into two groups: performer and audience. The former forced into effectively shouting their ideas into space, no matter how much they simply want to share and interact. The latter demanding that they be entertained, that their laziness and cowardice, unwillingness to push themselves rather than claim to be enlightened through their appreciation of other people's efforts, all be satisfied by those who they believe they validate through their presence.

This is not what I yearn for.
I yearn for social experiences, a natural product of life lived well, in which every person engages and participates. They do this for no other reason than that it is the right way for it to be done at that time. A dancer dances for themselves, but in doing so inspires a writer to put pen to paper, whose words feedback into the music played by musicians, guiding the hand of the artist and sculptor, shapes created compelling the dancer to push themselves to new places. And so on, with the linebetween all ever blurred and erased until the group and each indivudal a part of it finds themselves in a new place, filled with new ideas, concepts, imaginations and understandings. A pure experience done for no reason but its own self-worth and the self-worth of the individuals involved.

I have no idea what I am talking about.
These thoughts just run through my head day after day, never taking concrete form or shape, never showing me anything apart from frustration and confusion.
Something is lacking, but it is only out there to be grasped and embraced.
But I have no clue what it is.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Trip Mckenzie and the nuclear mirror

Face lies sideways, buried in the pillow.
Eyes closed or staring emptily into nothingness.
Fingers sitting impotently on the keyboard, elbow experiencing sensation of rough carpet.
This is all I feel right now.
In a moment I am sure my hip will being to hurt again.

Then I might cycle through the emotions of the evening, frustration and melancholy. Not a long cycle. I'm planning to be done with it in just a few minutes. Then  can start again.

The lamp is too bright, it is shining through my eyelids. How ineffectual a piece of the human body are our eyelids? IF they did their job properly we would not need curtains to sleep through the day. We do need curtains to sleep through the day. What else are we supposed to do till it gets dark?

In the mirror my own face stares back, this is not uncommon for a mirror to do. In the eyes of my reflection tiny nuclear explosions daisy chain endlessly. It is quite beautiful. I am not sure whether this makes my reflection a worse person than myself. I would quite like tiny nuclear explosions to detonate endlessly behind my eye, so I conclude that my reflection is a better person than me.

He also looks less melancholy and frustrated, but this may just be a trick. These things are hard to determine when you so busy staring at the explosions. Sometimes I wish my reflection wold say something to me, but he just looks back at me. I am sure that he manages somehow to be more impassive in his gaze than I am upon him. Which is unusual, given that he is nothing but my reflection.

Apart from the explosions in his eyes that is.

Ah, that one blew one eye out.
Now he is staring at me with a gaping white space where one eye used to be.
It is even more beautiful.
Like staring into the sun captured behind my own face.

I am jealous of my reflection more than ever now. Not only does one eye feature an endless parade of nuclear starbursts but his whole brain is a stellar event. Soon it shall go supernova and spread its essence throughout the universe, touching upon every soul that exists within it, sowing its seed in planets yet to be formed. Lighting up the darkest of dark matters and energies. Altering the frequency of essential vibratroy strings, plucking out the rhythm of the sum of his mind's life.

I hate my reflection. I hope he blows soon, at least then I won't have to stare at his impassive face any longer.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Trip Mckenzie and the suffocation set.

Writing, words, paper, pen, ink.

Nothing in my head. How do I get past this point?

Oral histories, fractal collapse and empty expression.

Powerful idease, but none with a voice.

Mind should be the voice, mine are the ideas.

So where is it?

What is strangling it stillborn in my throat?

Holding back the words, caged in head and heart, untouched by lips or fingers. Pure in abstraction, never reaching manual expression, concrete reality.

Why should they ever do this though?

Is this the wall?

The source?

Is this the doubt?

Empty expression, love of the abstract and the spontaneous.

The concept and the action.

But never the conscious combination of the two.

What would that add to the proceedings?

Existence in collapse. Awaiting new energies to annhilate stagnation and hold back the inevitably entropy.

But without the energy.

Witout development, progression, evolution, relative transcendence. Pond life is stifled, expansion repeats. Fractal suffocation.

The vision of my own context, framed by arrogance, blinds me.

'Ending forced by circumstance'

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Let us take the mundane for fuel, burn gas-lights through the night to equal the stars in their multitudinous beauty.
Let us rage upon the catalyst of other's lack of ambition.
Fly screaming into the clouds, shifting weather patterns, cold-fronts and jetstreams with our defiance of the refusal to challenge.
Do the chancers and the activists have any idea how tiring they are with their torrents of blandness?
Does the half-informed skeptic recognise the affront to understanding in their hastily paraded knowledge?
Do the decent and ego-less feel as indecent as they seem to me?
What could be more offensive than compliance at all costs to inoffensiveness?


The shocking, the conformist, they are aspects of the same species.
The apologist plague, to live defined by everything and anything but the self.

Let us inoculate our selves and find our faith.
True worth is the same value as self.
Let us brave the charge of arrogance and wear our self-confidence upon our sleeves.
Let us rip self-belief from its hiding place in our hearts; to be thrust flaming, bright and blinding, into the world.

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Saturday, March 10, 2007

Trip Mckenzie and the questions on the path.

A list of questions that I have been known to think about, but that would be of questionable stability. So I ask two that occurred to me this week.
The first I have no rational answer, but I have an idea.
The second, I have less or more idea, is far from rationality as can be.

What is this greatness of which stabs and hints in moments of awe and wonder?
Why and who do I sing about when singing to a song about love?

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

I've done alot of driving lately.

Nowhere exotic, but largely for good purpose, some even exciting in its way.

That is neither here nor there though, the reasons behind these drives, not only less than enthralling for anyone but me are not the point here.

With driving comes time free from distractions with my own mind. (yeah you have to concentrate on the road, but that still leaves alot more free mind space than the bludgeoning forces of tv and the internet.) So long as the roads are not busy, it is dark enough to cut out the outside world (or you are driving somewhere exciting, but for that I refer to my second sentence) and you have great music, then the otherwise dull task of getting from A-B can be time well spent.

You can also be surprised by some of the things you do see; even when driving along the same dull roads time after time. Coming off a motorway junction at 6.30 in the morning, driving up the slip-road, for one moment everything in front of you is cast in emerald blue light, as if the traffic lights, roundabout, road and even the sky all lay at the bottom of the most beautiful azure clear lake. And...well that is the only one that comes to mind right now, but there have been countless moments over the years, glimpsing beauty in the same places that feel like a prison ninety percent of the time and feel like nothing most of the rest.

Thoughts run through my mind, some I go with, draw out, chase down paths of logic and reason, sometimes just chase down no particular path. Others come into mind, provide a moments amusement, even inspiration only to be left on the road behind me. These last ones are the most frustrating and also the greatest, fleeting inspiration from the most unlikely of sources or from the depths of the mind and heart only realised in the pseudo-medititive state of something as monotonous as driving along a motorway. It is these that I grasp at, try to recapture...

And this is where it pays to do more than a little driving in a short space of time, even more so when the driving is done for good reason and the thoughts are bouyed up by the purpose behind the actions. For sometimes, if you pass along a route enough times with the right state of mind you do encounter those moments of inspiration again, still on the road where you left them, waiting for your return. Then, passenger to your soul once again, you can follow these thoughts as was always intended for you and from the pit of banality that is life in your so-called home a new path, idea and direction, a renewed purpose can be found.

So thank you to whoever I may have been driving for; I think I might have a direction to head in again.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Trip Mckenzie and the in five minutes.

Hell yeah, that title makes no sense.

Only got five minutes to write this. don't even know what I'm going to write yet.
ISS on the screen. Shouting for the Bream.
Substance abuse running through my veins, if the right girl had just said lets get some drugs you know I would.
Or not, something to think about.
Or not, who needs to think. Not enough time, only got five minutes then I'm back on.

Talk about matters of the heart, spirit of life, dance, rhythm and no blues. Pretty good huh, a whole night without any blues. If you could have that maybe once a week then you would have something. Or maybe not. I mean just because you don't have something negative does not mean that you have anything to fill the space.

What a way to live a life.
Add up the minutes hours seconds years draw up a chart find something to fill every second hour minutes year and day. Pick your experiences and then fill your life.
What a way.

Not for me though. That kind of organisation is for squares and I'll be damned if I'm one of them.

Running out of time, I only had five minutes for this, not enough time for thought. Thought gets too much attention anyway, what about instinct. So what we share instinct with the animals, ever watched a jaguar fight an anaconda? Ever seen a whale hanging around in the National Geographic? Or seen a Polar Bear gut a walrus?
They all live on instinct. Seems like a pretty good way to live.

Five minutes, instinct alone. What I would do if there was an opportunity to act on my instinct right now. Guess I'm not gonna do it though, no opportunity you see. Just gonna write this. And what is it?

Nothing. That's what.
But there ain't nothing wrong with nothing. Way I see it.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Trip Mckenzie and the short climb left.

My god this process of getting my damned thesis ready for submission is tiring. With each big step that I take it seems that a thousand tiny ones take its place. The distance keeps getting smaller yet at the same time it seems to break down into infinitesimally many points. Certainly I will have finished by the week, but so long has it been in getting to this point that I can in no way comprehend the end; so it is that each of these tiny hurdles seem like a mountain left in my path.

Ah, but I only have to remember that the view from a mountain top is the most breathtaking of all. I shall not get disheartened as I come to the summit; I shall see myself again at the top of the world.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

This place is pretty spooky; empty like this.

Lights, caravans and tents of joy. At night they are all empty, lifeless and desolate.

The lights are up anyway though, just for us. Tell me that ain't just a bit spooky?

There's a church in a sepia graveyard. Outside the church is a plasticine tree, like a monster out of an old Ray Harryhausen movie. Maybe some nights it comes alive, stop motion, unnatural, unnerving. Jerkily moving from grave to grave, drawing amputated stumps of arms across the stones. Lovingly, despite the clumsiness. It checks its wards, ensures that their rest is ever peaceful. If it does though it is missing the tragedy, they were all gone long ago.


Come on. I want to get out of this place. It feels like a million eyes on me. All looking right inside me. Can't we get out of here, I want to get out of here.

Don't you feel like that? How long have I felt like its time to get out of here. How many places have I felt like that. Yeah, this place is spooky. It's nothing new though is it? A circle of light, an infinite darkness outside the light. Nothing in the circle but yourself and you just want to get out. Go some place else, find something else, someone else, a world which extends past the horizon. Even to the horizon would be something.

Yeah this place ain't nothing new. Really its the same as every other place I ever am, every place I have ever been.

Maybe its not the place huh?

C'mon, let's get out of here man.

The only residents left in this sepia city are much more diminuitive than the tree's wards. There are millions of them occupying this place. Opportunists, stow-aways, plague-carriers, people of Apollo. Take your pick, they fit all of them well. Their empire extends around the world, but rarely do you spot them. In the graveyard though they live free. The ancient guardian, so protective of its domain remains ignorant of the blight beneath its feet. His old eyes are poor these days, his ears are gone, he cannot hear their scratch or their scurry, he cannot see their burrows and their holes. But I saw, saw them run across the grass, carefree and careless. Saw them run across the grass, under the tree, into the bushes, into their burrows. What we discard they take as home, what we bury, they feed. A city of bones a city of rats. A sad old tree, all alone.

You were right.

What about?

Let's just get out of here.

That's what I've been saying.

I know, let's get out of here.

How come? What was in there.

You were right?

What about?

Let's get out of here.

How come? What did you see.

Nothing. Let's get out of here.

How come. What happened.

You were right. They saw me.

Who saw you?

You were right.

What about?

A million eyes. A host of eyes. A city of eyes.

Let's get out of here.

Let's.

Where we gonna go?

I don't know. All I can see is the dark.

Friday, February 16, 2007

Trip Mckenzie and the bus of the night.

Hell yeah, this is gonna be great. Write something inspired and imaginative and dream-laden based upon such a mundane experience as taking the night bus home after a dull night out.


(let's not even get into the fact that a night which ends at 1.30 is hardly a night out. I should hardly even be out by that time.)

It maybe a mundane experience, the theory goes, but it is still an experience. There will be people on the bus, all kinds of people, who have had all kinds of adventures, all kinds of stories to tell. I can just look at those people and imagine what paths they have trodden to sit on that bus with me. What paths they will tread once they alight at their chosen destination. God isn't this actually really exciting? Something which seemed so mundane at first glance, but with a little thought we realise what amazing potential it has. What possibilities!

Not only could we imagine the lives of these nightlife explorers, but we can imagine ourselves interacting with those lives. Becoming entwined in the personal and infinite stories of our fellow night bus travellers. My god is that not exciting fuel for the mind? A million stories for each person and we could be a part of any of them. Imagination or reality, either one is a thrilling concept isn't it!

Standing at the bus stop, only ten minutes till this smorgasbord of experiences arrives. I can't even contain the excitement, so I waste five minutes finding a secluded spot to relieve the excitement.

Something seems wrong though. The bus is only two minutes away. So where are all the people?

There is a greasy fat kid, his greasy ugly friend and, I don't know, someone else, pretty sure there are three people but my mind shut down before I could even come up with a description of the third. It's not like my descriptions of the first two were that inspired either.

What is going on? This certainly does not seem like an imagination on fire. Creativity let loose, fanned, stoked, poked and fed until it runs wild and consumes all around it. This seems more like... wait for it... wait... this seems more like...

A really mundane bus trip back home after a dull night out that finished at the, so early it's not even disappointing, time of 1.30 with the accompanient of noone more inspiring than a greasy stupid looking teenager and his friend.

Well good god if that was not a disappointment.


Thursday, February 15, 2007

Trip Mckenzie and the whispering canyon.

Godamned those walls are high. Walls? Or are they cliffs? Or sides, maybe a canyon has sides.

Whatever the answer, godamned those things are high.

There is hardly any light down here on the canyon floor. I can't even see my... wait, my mistake, two feet right there. Same place as usual, end of my leg.

So ok, it isn't that dark. I can see my feet, my hands, even my nose. But still, pretty dark down here. Dark enough for me to comment on how dark it is at least.

Plenty light up there, above the canyon. Sun is out, looks like a good day. Actually, its probably more hellishly hot than pleasant. I am in the desert right. Or under it. In a canyon.

God. Why the hell I am at the bottom of an impossibly deep, reasonably dark canyon, all on my own. What possible purpose is being served by my being here.

Have I mentioned how cold it is down here. I shouldn't be surprised really, the canyon is on a glacier afterall. More of a ravine than a canyon if I am totally honest. Sorry did I say that I am in a desert. I meant an ice field. Which would mean that its not going to be hellishly hot up there at the top of this hole. It still won't be good weather though, just cold. Hel-ishly cold at that.

Hey, where did my nose go. Dammit. Now it really is dark. The sun just disappeared too. Went down pretty fast. How long have I been here anyway? Ah well, there are stars now. The stars are so much prettier than the sun anyway. Well, even though the sun is a star. Ok, so its a matter of perspective then, but from this perspective at least the sun is not as pretty as the other stars. Too damned big. And hot looking. Gold vs. silver. I always preferred silver, it speaks of night-time, loneliness, endless space, void. Gold is too warm. Who has time for warmth at the bottom of a godforsaken canyon. Ravine.

Still I'm sure the sun is just as pretty from the perspective of another star system. Maybe its even the prettiest damned star out there. Wouldn't that be something.

Did I tell you that this canyon has been whispering to me. For quite a while now, at least as long as I can remember. Which is... well I don't really know how long that is. Kind of hard to measure time when nothing happens. I suppose I could use the sun and the stars to mark time, but I seem to be too absent-minded for that. I keep getting distracted by these whispering walls. Really high whispering walls.

Not that I could tell you what they have been whispering to me. I have not been able to make out the words yet. Quite possibly it is in a language I don't understand. Odds are that it would be, can't expect all mystical canyons to speak english now can we. Especially the ones which are not in England.

Although I'm not sure if this one is outside of England. I suppose the answer to that would be pretty obvious if I could remember how I came to be in this abyss. But I can't. I couldn't even say with too much conviction that I have ever not been here.

There is that whispering again. Like I say, I can't make out the words. It is definitely speech though, it has that unmistakeable rhythm to it. Definitely, this canyon has been trying to speak to me for a good while now.

Man, it must be getting pretty annoyed by now. Waiting for the stupid human to understand its words. I guess it has plenty of time on its hands though. Longer than I have anyway.

I wonder which will come first, understanding or death?

Maybe I can't die here though. That would be pretty nice. Certainly been stucking in a canyon forever doesn't sound that great, but I bet if I can make out what these walls are saying to me it will be worth it.

I'm gonna be quiet now. See if I can pick out a word of too. The canyon is whispering to me again.



Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Imagine a city which exists only as it falls through an infinite sky. Every second brings with it a different sphere, a different climate, environment, perspective background and reality. One moment it falls through cloud another through void. From time to time its citizens can reach out touch the stars. Other times it is they who reach out into the inky blackness and with their fingers poke holes through the velvet night curtains to create those same stars. Every second of life in this city is a second’s inspiration. And another waits just around time’s corner.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

My waking day is filled with concrete experiences. One and a half meals, walk a hundred streets, one street walked a hundred times. Sit at a table in one or three cafes, book, computer, writing pad. A girl in drugstore, a friend in a bar. Work done no my thesis, pleasantries exchanged with strangers. Impassioned conversation over such weighty issues as science vs. mysticism, repetitive structures through history, cultures and intellectual traditions, internal against external, the means to truth and happiness.

God knows how many cups of coffee I drink in a day.

It is the conversation that marks today as one of awful realisation. Highlights the dream vs. the day. The simple fact that the awful, pointless and terrible dream wins every day.

This conversation of ideas, concepts, meaning and morality. To others, this is what I do, some kind of junior professional philosopher bringing to the table his skills. In conjunction with the expertise and passions of others, the attempted exploration of our lives.

Learn to think, find a worthy project, topic or question which grabs you. Learn to think and press the button 'apply to the world'. Philosophy as career has a point, a purpose; it is not without reference. I try to convince others of this and I try to convince myself.

Justify the path or more truthfully, distract myself with meaning where I grasp there to be none.

A day of experience, moments of application and now I am laughing. I don't buy a word of it. I buy the dream. And there, there is nothing to buy.

The dream wins every time, push it back, close it off, imprison it on Alcatraz, run as far as I can conceive. Ignore it and shout in its godamned face. Nothing keeps it at bay for long, it simply denies what I method I most recently chose until I come to agree with it once again. Then we, I and the dream, deny everything.

The dream shifts and changes. It used to be the IReal and the matching concept of LEOTI. The theory of the detective story. Clues are never the answer, they just mark the path toward the answer. The answer must be discovered, not uncovered.

Clue after clue builds up, each identical to the last: something is up with what I perceive to be the world. This idea is formulaic for sure. I even made a t-shirt attesting to this idea as a teenager; but then this formulaic idea is not the answer to the mystery, just a clue.

So it starts.

Before long I am denying that anything is real but asserting something. When there so clearly is something and it is not real, then, what the hell is there? Enter the IReal and its Lucid Experience.

The ideas are laughable, make no sense, conform to no logic, soundness of thought. Not because of brilliance, but rather childish arrogance. Deny the Real to non-assert the IReal.

All I am doing is adding a nullifier to every term.

I am aware of this yet I become convinced that I am close and so I pull back. It is this or the world and this time I chose the world.

Half-heartedly I throw myself into being a person; for want of anything better I throw myself half-heartedly into finishing my journeyman years as a professional philosopher.

Today I am almost there and today is concrete but then it is there again. The dream. This time literally as well as figuratively. But as I said, it shifts and it changes.

New clues, new ideas and now they are so worthlessly insane as to be far beyond my waking mind's comprehension...