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| | Temple (n): ... 3. An edifice devoted to special or exalted purposes. [Webster's Online Dictionary] | | ||||
RAMBLINGS||breaking point||tantalus||Anything I write here is bound to be disorganized and random, and has a good chance of being completely incomprehensible. You have been warned. breaking point Unbearable intoxication from the joy of contact (Is this mine own country?) overwhelming sense and logic, prudence cannot stand in the face of exhilaration. Why? Because this human has been corrupted by chance and time, and the model no longer stands. What need of chemical debilitation when one's own body can twist reality into surreal stripes of time and space? What need of comfort - it's all in the mind. Perhaps only then will we find the cure - but never, because we are not the masters, no more than a tree is the master of the ground. Clusters of cells (awareness, its constitution, the lines grow weak and weary) say yes, but they too are so deeply rooted in the prison of life, and of living, and of physical being. Today I am here. (Breathe in. Breathe out. Life goes on.) tantalus To dream of freedom: Tantalus in the river cries out in a swoon, unable, his fingertips brush torturingly against a low-hanging grape, so vivid and sweet and undoubtedly juicy, it would quench his thirst with one bite, but it draws away from him, as everything does. No, it doesn't feel as if it were drawing away - more that he is being shrunken into some other dimension, folded away from the precious grapes, and each time he bends to the water, it flirts away in a whirl of eddies, and what he manages to cup in his hands - they make a game of it, letting the water stay there, cool and clear and wet in his thirsty palms - as he lifts it to his lips (that was at first) or dashes it toward his mouth (later on, as he realized what they are doing) it disappears with a faint haunting fragrance of renewal and purity, but he is not to be renewed or purified. He is to remain in the darkness, within arm's reach of the light, denied the escape of sleep, of death, of insanity. One day a small insect lands on his face, bites him hard, and wings away. The bite swells into a painful inflamed sore, but the water now vanishes when he brings it to his face. He tries wetting his hands, not filling them, and applying that sheen of wetness to the wound - anything to stop the pain - but his hand is drier than ever when it touches the wound and he bellows in agony as his dry skin scrapes over it. Many months later it comes again and lands on his other cheek. By then, starving beyond recognition - he has made yet another fruitless string of attempts to pluck the fruit, driving himself into an anguished desperate frenzy as he fails again and again, as the ground beneath his feet twists and hurls him away from the precious fruit, and as one bloodshot eye wavers into focus on the insect, he gives a strange harsh choking sound and with a turn of his lips he is attempting to eat the insect. It stings his tongue and flies away and he is in greater agony than ever. Sweat trickles down his back, down his chest, in small half-dried rivulets down his arms and behind his ears and into his eyes. He wipes it away. It leaves a salty pungent residue but he cannot wash now, not even his hands. The water taunts him; when he reaches towards it, it no longer retreats from him but dimples downward, awayward, so that his hands encounter only pockets of air. For now he is submerged waist down - he does not know and does not want to know what kind of foul watery decay has befallen his lower body, but the water to his yearning eyes and eager tongue seems as crystallinely beautiful as before, no, even more so. Its beauty stuns, makes him dizzy with awe even as its capriciousness sends him raving into fits of despairing rage. On the first day that the water begins to taunt him thus, he beats and flails wildly at its surface, crying (he would regret this later, he doesn't know where the tears come from but they come anyway in a salty trickle to match his sweat and afterward his eyes are sore and his face is extra sticky and he is thirstier than he'd ever been) but the water parts under his hands so that each furious swing digs mocking trenches in the crystal skin of the water. Every so often he lapses into blank despairing silence and lets himself sag into the best death he can approximate, nothingness, but it doesn't work. Something always spurs him into grasping life again, be it a scourge-bearing fury whose tongue is a sharp as his is deprived, or the vision of a twelve-course banquet complete with sound (the sizzle of the freshly cooked fowl) and smell (ah the fragrance of a perfectly seasoned stew) (but not taste and touch, never taste and touch, because his hand only goes through the roast fowl and when he crouches to slurp straight from the stewpot he tastes only the stale air of the underworld). He stopped dreaming of freedom an age ago, and dreamed only of some modicum of comfort, of satisfaction. Now he no longer dares dream even of satisfaction. Oblivion, he thinks, would be good enough. A REPOSITORY OF DREAMS||flight||spiderwebs||Dreams, if one can remember them, tend to be interesting, to say the least. We need not speculate about their symbolism or significance. flight I dreamed of a man-child who wished to make me his, and I dreamed of fleeing: up and away, into an office, lock the door, close the windows; surrounded by kind anxious faces, those who would help me all they could. But his people could fly as well and they came up to the closed windows and snarled, tapping, and they saw us, and I could do nothing. I fled downwards, downwards as far as I could go, each level a museum of strange art or machinery, colorful or muted, always unfamiliar. I sought the next flight of stairs to take me away from the pursuer - they hid in exhibits or displayed themselves openly, and I took them three steps at a time rushing headlong heedless desperate putting as much space as I could between him and me. But as I ran past each level small things stirred and raised my hackles; I ignored them and ran down down down until I touched on the bottommost basement and I was trapped. Then a door opened and I saw the servant - his servant, and the world came alive with malice around me. And I ran again, up, knowing that others were waiting there; and I sought refuge and found none. I don't know if I ever escaped. I woke up, or I forgot it already. Neither can I remember the first confrontations, when I did not fear yet, and they were not confrontations but meetings. Before I knew. All I remember is the insistence - the tireless heated insistence - the indefatigable relentless insistence of a pursuer who would not stop, would not give up, and the faces of the kind ones, and the paper chains that decorated their offices walls, and the little yellowish lights that we did not extinguish in time. And I remember how I felt at the moment of discovery, the indescribable horrified - unnatural - unheeded pleas - and I remember that at first I did not fear. spiderwebs I dreamt I was trapped within a fenced-off perimeter, in the shape of a small bird (yet I was, at the same time, completely human in shape - who can explain the strangeness of dreams?). The wire fence was sticky with cobwebs, still alive with spiders of all shapes and sizes. As I darted toward the impassable fence, hoping to squeeze through the holes in the mesh, my movements sent spiders scuttling toward me, and I backed off hastily. But no matter how high I flew, the fence was still there, and the only way out was to break through. At length, I realized the impossibility of my situation, and told myself that I had to take the task in hand, and do it. Trying to avert my eyes, I tore through as much web and wire as I could. Words fail to express the disgust that overcame me, but I persisted, driven by my inherent longing for freedom. Halfway through, I saw yet another fence surrounding the first, every bit as cobwebbed and spider-studded as the first - perhaps more. Around me, the spiders were beginning to gather; not far off, I saw another bird similarly trapped, struggling uselessly as his death inched closer. My first thought was that we might escape together, but I knew that if I extricated myself, turning back would be suicide. And so, returning my attention to my own predicament, I found to my horror that I was stuck! The spiders closed in. I awoke. |
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