I waited and watched. It was a few minutes after dusk, and the skies had already turned a deep shade of indigo, all pretence of blue and orange and pink shed quickly after the sun's departure from the heavens. The green of trees was gone from the world, as the green of trees had always gone from the world for centuries before the moment I knew would come soon.
Bough and bark was bathed in a strange darkness that was not merely the absence of light; it was a darkness of and by itself, a monster that spawned other terrors in the minds of those who knew fear and other doubts in the minds of those who knew loneliness. It consumed everything, even my home from where I looked. I was out of matches, or I knew could've scared the monster away, chased it into the corner whence it had come, no longer to pour out from my past as the echoes of my youth.
I looked at my watch again, making sure I was on time and wouldn't miss the awakening. The lamppost, the pillar of metal that had my unwavering attention, was a few hundred paces away from me, straight ahead, its crown lost in the thick foliage of a banyan planted by the side of the road. Cars passed by beneath the tree, their eyes shining light into the black blanket that buffeted their forms, they pushed through with an industrial groan into the future that awaited their arrival.
It was either war or hatred they drove into, but it was a future of some sort nonetheless, and when cars and other wheeled things went into the future, they went into the future with hope. A hope that things would be different, or a hope that they would make them different. One way or another, the cars passed by, momentarily caught in my present where I would consider them thus and then let them slip out through the corner of my eye.
All this while, I was only seeing ahead, I wasn't looking, I wasn't watching. But now, I watched because I could see a dull amber glow come on amongst the banyan's leaves, and there was light suddenly as it blossomed steadily to become white, whiter, and soon, the blackness around it was gone. The monster was gone from my world, and the dark green of the leaves became discernible from even this distance, even though they possessed the penalty of thieving from the brilliance of man and were tinged with dirty orange.
No matter, though: let there be light, said man, and there was light. God, I knew, would have been taken aback at that moment because man had usurped him, brought in a darkness upon himself that only he could save himself from, and the need for godliness was no more. He was his own anti-particle, a bringer of light and in its shadow, a vast darkness, a creator and destroyer of worlds and worlds—trapped between the two layers of a consciousness that was turning in on itself.
Further down the road, there was a bridge, a flyover, and it was painted entirely blue. Like the lamppost, it reminded of something else other than itself, a representation that so far away from the real so as to be entirely different, a nature removed by Sputnik as much as to be art. The construction reminded of a sea I had seen somewhere, either beyond the shores near my home one night or on a television scream, a sea of orange and pink and blue and yellow and cyan and black like the contents of a lava lamp spewed on a sheet of Alamogordo glass, its bomb-hewn surface gently breathing radiation.
Tens of lampposts flanked its long, serpentine body, and even though some of its scales peeled away with a nostalgic redolence, I thought it was absolutely beautiful. Maybe because I also thought it was human, the way it breathed, the way it swallowed, digested and spat out, the way it stood still between the past and the future, basking in the glory of its creator that was also man.
My environment was not of divinity's making but of its defiance’s, a new formless world ridden with confusion and scepticism, full of windows that opened into walls and doors that opened onto the ceiling, but still filled with people trying to fix things. A mound of clay that was still slightly wet even after the child's hands had massaged it into an ugly lump.
There was hope, a hope that the day bridges would be taken for granted, the day lampposts would be turned off to make way for an equalizing darkness, the day I would walk amongst the tress and the forest's animals and birds and not find the raging wheeled in my presence, man would regret what would have befallen him by then, a world bereft of his intelligence and a world of surrender.
There was hope that the day man learned of his antithetical character to divinity and the destructive deck waiting to be dealt between his five fingers, man would also learn he could chase god away from his kingdom and fashion in the beast's place a throne for himself. There was hope that man would sit upon that throne.
Showing posts with label surrealism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label surrealism. Show all posts
Saturday, 12 November 2011
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
Thursday, 22 September 2011
The eunuch named K. and his-her mustache.
I know how the smart mind fears stoppage.
Against the clear and blue Bangalorean sky, the buildings stand still, the chafed facades of concrete meaningless against the still yet depthless waters in the empyrean receptacle. Flakes of clouds seem imminent in the western distance, and their approach is slow, graceful, and all such and other things lost from the weakened mind. The eternal struggle diminishes its distinctive flavor and grinds it constantly along the edges; it lies now like a chamfered ingot of iron that pushes itself, sans any intelligence whatsoever, a metallic zombie, pushes itself toward construction and contribution.
Then again, there are no footholds in the clear and blue Bangalorean sky. It slips over the mountains in the East and slips into the sea in the East like a satin bedspread unfurled across the lands within the horizons and let to lie there like a vast stretch of discarded canvas. I digress: it is not my place to comment on the performative genders of dreams. Do you see the struts, K.?
The struts. The struts are essential because they hold up the whole structure, and the struts are essential because they give you some meaning to work with. When the structure's up, you can lean on it. Lean? Why is there any leaning? Let the structure stand, I say, and let it grow toward the heavens. That's the point of this task, to let them grow and flaw so that I may know wherewith to grant on my remedies, my solutions, and know that I'm on my way to manhood. To know that I've long since crossed puberty, and that a mustache is imminent, and that the man will flower and give birth to another young man, and young men will abound for the joy of the creator! Who?
The creator! The dreams of our nights when the canvas' weave breaks at odd places and starlight shines through like the very, very distance edge of a cosmic scissor. A trimmer! A trimmer? You've lost it. You've lost me. You call yourself an agent, you narcissist, you! You're a pimp! A pleasure-monger, and if I let you, you will make a product out of my dreams, a package of intellectual gibberish. You will call it a construction! But it is a construction!
Oh, no, no, no, no, it is not a construction. It was constructed but it is not yet in possession of a completion, and in lacking that completion, it lacks everything it possesses, you abacinated man! Move that place from in front of your eyes and throw it away into the skies, and let it quench, that malleated veil. Oh, it's electric, but it blinds with its metallic will, its metallic will. The mustache will never come not as a matter of destiny, no, it will reject invitations and it will reject prospects because mustaches have no dreams, and it will choose to languish as a eunuch in that womb whence I came, and it languishes in the comfort of my joy and my pleasures that I left behind. Oh, the cavernous orphanage! Not the orphanage! Why the orphanage at all?!
I will become a man, I swear to you, I will become a man and I will do it by climbing up onto the terrace of that building, the one with the chafed facade of pink paint and very old concrete, and from there, I will traverse the skies. I know how the smart mind fears stoppage, and hidden twelve feet under that moment of stoppage is my manhood, the pause-and-think, the pitch-and-toss-and-never-worry-about-my-loss endeavour that we all know stands in my way, S.
We all do, don't we?! Assumptions! Pshaw! And from there- Pshaw!- from THERE!, from beneath that vast pit that opens only into the skies, I will not lean but climb all the stairs it proffers for my climbing. There, on top of the world, I will become a man. A child will be born and he will descend from the heavens. Do not kill him.
Listen to me, O Cosmic Builder, O! That was fantastic but you must know that I will leave now, your much-impressed creator, and I will leave now to create this Universe in your image, in your contorted image. Be warned, father, you who cower in the darkness and run unclothed under the white sun, listen! You must lean upon your construction and push against it with all your masculine strength for if you keep building and building, you will be a mason, a constructor, and never an artist, never a performer except for the pleasing of your own self, and there, look therein!
Look to find that you don't want to be a man, and if you never will break and only birth all the while, you will never be a man. A eunuch, a half-man, but never the full one. The mustache, then? Precisely.
Against the clear and blue Bangalorean sky, the buildings stand still, the chafed facades of concrete meaningless against the still yet depthless waters in the empyrean receptacle. Flakes of clouds seem imminent in the western distance, and their approach is slow, graceful, and all such and other things lost from the weakened mind. The eternal struggle diminishes its distinctive flavor and grinds it constantly along the edges; it lies now like a chamfered ingot of iron that pushes itself, sans any intelligence whatsoever, a metallic zombie, pushes itself toward construction and contribution.
Then again, there are no footholds in the clear and blue Bangalorean sky. It slips over the mountains in the East and slips into the sea in the East like a satin bedspread unfurled across the lands within the horizons and let to lie there like a vast stretch of discarded canvas. I digress: it is not my place to comment on the performative genders of dreams. Do you see the struts, K.?
The struts. The struts are essential because they hold up the whole structure, and the struts are essential because they give you some meaning to work with. When the structure's up, you can lean on it. Lean? Why is there any leaning? Let the structure stand, I say, and let it grow toward the heavens. That's the point of this task, to let them grow and flaw so that I may know wherewith to grant on my remedies, my solutions, and know that I'm on my way to manhood. To know that I've long since crossed puberty, and that a mustache is imminent, and that the man will flower and give birth to another young man, and young men will abound for the joy of the creator! Who?
The creator! The dreams of our nights when the canvas' weave breaks at odd places and starlight shines through like the very, very distance edge of a cosmic scissor. A trimmer! A trimmer? You've lost it. You've lost me. You call yourself an agent, you narcissist, you! You're a pimp! A pleasure-monger, and if I let you, you will make a product out of my dreams, a package of intellectual gibberish. You will call it a construction! But it is a construction!
Oh, no, no, no, no, it is not a construction. It was constructed but it is not yet in possession of a completion, and in lacking that completion, it lacks everything it possesses, you abacinated man! Move that place from in front of your eyes and throw it away into the skies, and let it quench, that malleated veil. Oh, it's electric, but it blinds with its metallic will, its metallic will. The mustache will never come not as a matter of destiny, no, it will reject invitations and it will reject prospects because mustaches have no dreams, and it will choose to languish as a eunuch in that womb whence I came, and it languishes in the comfort of my joy and my pleasures that I left behind. Oh, the cavernous orphanage! Not the orphanage! Why the orphanage at all?!
I will become a man, I swear to you, I will become a man and I will do it by climbing up onto the terrace of that building, the one with the chafed facade of pink paint and very old concrete, and from there, I will traverse the skies. I know how the smart mind fears stoppage, and hidden twelve feet under that moment of stoppage is my manhood, the pause-and-think, the pitch-and-toss-and-never-worry-about-my-loss endeavour that we all know stands in my way, S.
We all do, don't we?! Assumptions! Pshaw! And from there- Pshaw!- from THERE!, from beneath that vast pit that opens only into the skies, I will not lean but climb all the stairs it proffers for my climbing. There, on top of the world, I will become a man. A child will be born and he will descend from the heavens. Do not kill him.
Listen to me, O Cosmic Builder, O! That was fantastic but you must know that I will leave now, your much-impressed creator, and I will leave now to create this Universe in your image, in your contorted image. Be warned, father, you who cower in the darkness and run unclothed under the white sun, listen! You must lean upon your construction and push against it with all your masculine strength for if you keep building and building, you will be a mason, a constructor, and never an artist, never a performer except for the pleasing of your own self, and there, look therein!
Look to find that you don't want to be a man, and if you never will break and only birth all the while, you will never be a man. A eunuch, a half-man, but never the full one. The mustache, then? Precisely.
Monday, 19 September 2011
Fin de siècle
The sky was on fire. In the west, a violent orange glow blossomed out from a point that seemed just beyond the horizon. Black clouds were climbing out, erupting into petals of grey that gently floated to the zenith before disappearing into insignificant wisps of rain.
A giant fetus was descending down from the sky. From beneath the bridge of steel, I could see only its body; its head and legs were out of sight behind the buildings to my left and my right. The hue of its skin was a golden yellow, but it was an unpleasant sight, the skin of its form draped with dripping eidolons and an unspeakable horror exploded to life behind my eyes.
Men ran screaming in all directions. Some of the women fainted; they were forgotten, left behind by a madness ripe with sourceless fear, a disbelief that stretched their consciences toward puerile humor, to laughter. A rejection of this real and unborn child into a pus-filled boil, and a "pop!" later, it would be gone with it, too. And they would all be left standing, laughing, and then they would pick up their wives and go home to television sets.
The children themselves stood and gazed, but it was a silent and voiceless agony that rooted them to their spots, the picture of the prophet reflected brightly in the tears in their eyes, a form moving slowly but steadily to meet them. It was an encounter and they were meeting their creator.
I shuddered to think what might happen if the child landed. There was no way to know, of course: never before had such a thing happened. There was also the chance that other such fetuses were descending from the empyrean around the world, over large cities, overs people, over running men and swooning women, over praying children, over me.
I ran. I didn't run away from the monster but I ran to get under it. In a moment of brilliance, I positioned myself right under the approaching form and waited with a knife held up towards it. I waited. It seemed to come closer and closer. After an hour, I was sure it would fall upon the knife and bleed to death. But no, it covered the entire sky, blanketing all humanity beneath a shroud of half-alive and surely malformed skin, the stench of it disgusting, filling my nose with the pungent indulgence of sulfurous and sulfidic gases.
The world was dark. Humankind was tottering on the brink of extinction. I had given up all hope when the fetus awakened from its strange sleep. It woke up and began to cry, to bawl. It was the last mourning.
A giant fetus was descending down from the sky. From beneath the bridge of steel, I could see only its body; its head and legs were out of sight behind the buildings to my left and my right. The hue of its skin was a golden yellow, but it was an unpleasant sight, the skin of its form draped with dripping eidolons and an unspeakable horror exploded to life behind my eyes.
Men ran screaming in all directions. Some of the women fainted; they were forgotten, left behind by a madness ripe with sourceless fear, a disbelief that stretched their consciences toward puerile humor, to laughter. A rejection of this real and unborn child into a pus-filled boil, and a "pop!" later, it would be gone with it, too. And they would all be left standing, laughing, and then they would pick up their wives and go home to television sets.
The children themselves stood and gazed, but it was a silent and voiceless agony that rooted them to their spots, the picture of the prophet reflected brightly in the tears in their eyes, a form moving slowly but steadily to meet them. It was an encounter and they were meeting their creator.
I shuddered to think what might happen if the child landed. There was no way to know, of course: never before had such a thing happened. There was also the chance that other such fetuses were descending from the empyrean around the world, over large cities, overs people, over running men and swooning women, over praying children, over me.
I ran. I didn't run away from the monster but I ran to get under it. In a moment of brilliance, I positioned myself right under the approaching form and waited with a knife held up towards it. I waited. It seemed to come closer and closer. After an hour, I was sure it would fall upon the knife and bleed to death. But no, it covered the entire sky, blanketing all humanity beneath a shroud of half-alive and surely malformed skin, the stench of it disgusting, filling my nose with the pungent indulgence of sulfurous and sulfidic gases.
The world was dark. Humankind was tottering on the brink of extinction. I had given up all hope when the fetus awakened from its strange sleep. It woke up and began to cry, to bawl. It was the last mourning.
Monday, 7 March 2011
Alive With A Colour Of Death
Solo winds of loneliness /
Neutrons fly alone in the wind /
Lust you can always trust /
Even after lakes crumble to dust /
Eagles fly around me /
Call it death trying to surprise me /
I bleed a new colour today /
Day after night after day /
We shall sail for ever /
Fie upon the sad wings of destiny /
The eagles have come to find us /
Find us where we will always be /
I don’t know what to say but shout /
These are the tidings of failure beyond doubt /
Please let’s let the fire go /
The cloudy skies of the dreamer /
Have an old rain to pass on to the solo winds /
Why have you achieved nothing amongst the gold /
Did you fall again amongst grasses tall /
Do the stars not seem to care at all /
Should I have sorrow /
Return my soul instead /
You’re still wearing that smile from yesterday /
How do you separate the night from another day /
How do you know the prospects are all gone /
A day went by and fooled /
I thought that you could strangle me /
Wake me from these sleepless dreams /
Atlantis is drowned and now lost /
And the purple stalker continues his quest /
Can you hear the saints weeping in Hell /
Out in the cold and run of the mill /
When the stars fall in a blue rain /
I stand alone in the purple haze /
A prisoner of your eyes /
Of your eyes in the morning light /
Neutrons fly alone in the wind /
Lust you can always trust /
Even after lakes crumble to dust /
Eagles fly around me /
Call it death trying to surprise me /
I bleed a new colour today /
Day after night after day /
We shall sail for ever /
Fie upon the sad wings of destiny /
The eagles have come to find us /
Find us where we will always be /
I don’t know what to say but shout /
These are the tidings of failure beyond doubt /
Please let’s let the fire go /
The cloudy skies of the dreamer /
Have an old rain to pass on to the solo winds /
Why have you achieved nothing amongst the gold /
Did you fall again amongst grasses tall /
Do the stars not seem to care at all /
Should I have sorrow /
Return my soul instead /
You’re still wearing that smile from yesterday /
How do you separate the night from another day /
How do you know the prospects are all gone /
A day went by and fooled /
I thought that you could strangle me /
Wake me from these sleepless dreams /
Atlantis is drowned and now lost /
And the purple stalker continues his quest /
Can you hear the saints weeping in Hell /
Out in the cold and run of the mill /
When the stars fall in a blue rain /
I stand alone in the purple haze /
A prisoner of your eyes /
Of your eyes in the morning light /
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