the people look like flowers at last, and i guess
what matters most is how well you walk through the fire*
worth the palette, and the eyes - it's the beef tongue honesty
as cited in the poem of the same name -
never mind the 1930s poem -
i too wish i could have written the 1980s
(Poland) - but the communist years
are marred and budding in China while
people bemoan the two years under Martial
Law - and queues, endless queues for
provisions, and stamps for rationed food,
and shops filled with empty shelves or
white vinegar (a childhood friend's mother
was rumoured to have committed suicide
by drinking white vinegar) -
in all honesty i guess before the borders opened
and products started pouring in we could
have claimed a happy childhood,
but for us back then it was the call of the wild -
and the fact that we were together as kids,
even though the steel plant was being undermined
for profit and people were either forced to
leave to somewhere else in the country or
abroad - a thriving beehive of a town reduced to
what became know as the pensioner town -
supermarkets sprouted like churches, the city
centre once a trading hot spot was now the bank
square - nothing but banks; growing up i used to
travel for summer holidays - a fit child i became
hooked on the coca cola dream - between 16 and 17
i lost 30 kilograms on my bike back home, doing
50 kilometres a day - once the fat kid at the back
of the class, now the pomegranate munching hippy -
but that didn't matter: aged 21... god... jealousy
is so horrible, it transcends the healthy competitive
streak of sports and capitalism - now, each waking
hour i wait for the evening so i can numb the pain
riddling my brain - it's like being perpetually nibbled
on my an electric chair - and i can't do anything about
the sizzling of blood on this organic sponge -
headphones sometimes provide an equilibrium
and i jack-in and the pain is reduced - but try talking
to someone when you can't hear them - god, jealousy
is so horrible - i remember times when i'd go with
the guy to Reagent's Park mosque and sit there on
the minimalist floor and just absorb this grand
poly-chromatic social experiment - born into a monochromatic
culture i was fond of the diversity - but times have
changed for the worse, and i'm proof of it -
as i already mentioned the other great schism (not
in religion but) in medicine - what insanity overcomes
them treating physical damage with metaphysical
promises of a chemical imbalance? they treat the brain
as some ******* chicken soup - thankfully i was well
aware of everything - but that's beside the point,
why i survived i attribute to what happened to Sisyphus -
i'm not going to be as bombastic as the original version
depicts Sisyphus, son of Atlas (both of them the boulder
men) - well, i don't see Sisyphus as an absurd hero
like Camus - i very much see him akin to Loki (the trickster),
but it's not about that - for me Sisyphus had a near-death
experience, and was condemned by the gods to
that boulder of his and the ***** and the rolling back
and forth as punishment for that Sisyphus had no insight
from his near-death experience - he didn't become a poet,
and he certainly didn't become a philosopher -
nor a ***, rebellious in the sense that what Sisyphus
did do is return to business as usual - he had no insight
into death, he didn't befriend it, he didn't akin to
Marcel Proust or Tristan Tzara gain "a new way of seeing";
not many people have near-death experiences in all
honesty - and from the myth as stated, few can return
with insight - most come back with cliches, the unimaginative
white light at the end of the tunnel -
Sisyphus was condemned to the boulder for his lack
of inspiration - then again, any madman talking about
the next world with promises is doing a handstand while
attempting to outperform someone running the hundred
metres - circus Olympics - what's keeping me motivated
is what others would call the Cartesian extension -
my brain can't craft a fluid cognitive narrative with ease
as it once was able to do - these are snippets of what reminds
me of the ease that the brain once hosted -
which contradictory if Descartes was about -
a thinking thing is un-extended - if that were true
he wouldn't have out-poured his thinking onto a blank
page - matter extends but does not think - unless of course
you get into a debate about god (i don't see the point
ascribing atheism all the perks - i'm also referring to an
impersonal entity, not a personal entity that might require
praying five times a day for personal gains and repressed
grievances - you know, god of the airy fairy and the casual
phrasing of the word that is usually censored by
Jews - g- -d - which i find as absurd as western censorship
of oath words). so coming back to this Descartes point,
it's true that physical corruption (damage) would qualify
me as a non-thinking entity, pure matter, and therefore
purely extending onto this digital pixel white -
but the counter argument is... there's a distinction between
thought and narrative - and given the casual standard
of philosophy is more akin to narration than abstraction
of either 2 + 2 in mathematics, or μ + ω
in phonetic encoding or whether ω could be encoded
to a more aesthetically pleasing macron-omicron (ō) -
because if we're going to follow Descartes prescription
(they are like doctors, those philosophers, or that's
how i treat them, every key idea they regurgitate out
from their predecessors - a priori - and is new
and challenging i treat it like i'd treat a prescription from
a doctor - Heidegger, for example, prescribed me
the equivalent of sleeping pills for my insomnia) we
don't have to necessarily accept it as the gold standard,
holy, a sword in a stone - but i'm not going to fall
for the rigidity of their vocabulary, the part where using
imagery would refer to a monkey pushing cubes
through a canvas of squares to the other side of something -
or that great table tennis match of philosophical
narration - how did something, nothing, everything,
anything are categorised as pronouns akin to
i, you, me, he etc. - i don't like their concentration on
either nothing or the basic self - that always bothered me -
but i guess it adds to the fluidity of language -
now i'm lost in my own labyrinth - and there's
the Minotaur on my heels breathing pungent hot-snot
from his snout - which can only mean one thing -
a trap to get into fixations and the stability of words
as one-dimensional, non-deviating from a unitary meaning,
rigidity of the non-existence of synonyms -
basically burning the Thesaurus Rex - which also means
no oil for cooking or butter for bread, or anti-ageing
creams - if ever anyone wanted one-dimensional
words, rigid language, a stability of some sort,
safe ~chemistry experiments read from a primer and
never new, black is black, white is white -
well... but i guess there's a preference for such an
approach to language, rather than the antonym of
such use of it, with negations in politics, in jurisprudence,
lies and corruptions, nuances, games and injured
hearts;
Sisyphus ibin Atlas was punished because after
a near-death experience he didn't come back with
any insight - he just returned to his day job, and didn't
gamble on something beautiful - however
scrambled eggs it looked like.
