The Walls Came Down

Wounded is my pride that I carry with me on my back. Yes, it aches. As I am caught between a senseless conflict between the illusion of greatness without foundation and the probing lasers of the observers. The latter feeds what is seen to the cycle mind, the mind on repeat. It's a war of projection in which there are no casualties but egos. I am thus left with a mood of inevitability, a sentiment of somehow missing my worth and my devotion while I am carried, weightless, to a new place.

I imagine I am floating, drifting, going where the wind takes me. It's quite apparent in this state that my emotions have been numbed and distanced from the limbs of my body so that they merely feel within me, without attachment. As peculiar as this may be, it is close to a freedom I did not envision. I can smile, but I do not find a drive to. My pride, the fortress of it, is crumbling into the dust from whence it manifested itself. I could shed tears if I held on, but I couldn't. I let go, and in limbo is not where I expected to be. I feel relieved that I was not suppressed aside and merely left to walk out through the gates as the walls burned and the sky turned a dissimilar shade of blue. I did not come out on horseback or in a carriage named Peace. I simply ambled down the path and the threshold was passable. I went through and in the next few shots, the citadel behind me, is falling. Falling.

I am no more. No more.

There is nothing left in the wreckage. The ruins deconstruct themselves as effervescent structures. Out of mind, they go. The dust cloud is clearing and soon the way will be free of distraction or blurriness. There will be vision. There will be truth. And there will be no corners nor shadows where there are no walls. No places for fear to hide, it has to finally see itself under the yonder, among the plains.

This place, the barren, the past forgotten and the now remembered, has always been here. From here, do I truly begin. As the seed in the soil, I lift up through to the light, and I flourish, unhindered. In this empty place, a wonder grows.

Suddenly, I see the things I used to see so differently,
I feel as if I've found a new reality.
Suddenly, the noise outside my window is a symphony,
A symphony of endless possibility, right in front of me.

Suddenly, I understand the meaning of eternity.
I'm reaching out my hand to touch you,
Now I see, suddenly.

Amidst All The Black And The Undone

So high. Just amazing, the view from up here. There are few clouds in sight, apart from the one I'm on of course. Floating is freeing, physically. What happened?

Firstly, let there be words.

Entanglement
Written words
Desolace
Gentle whispering
Forgotten

Flickering street light
Breathing
Footsteps
Nowhere in particular
Crowds
But no one

Broken inertia
Dream of the day
Awakening
Eyes widening
Anchored heart
Pull
Pull

Yearning to escape
Confronting the past
Dancing
Empathy
Emotions are loss, abandonment
Question
Floating in the yonder

Now, let there be a story.

Somehow, beneath the following tracks of the pendulum, the earth moves. It slumbers and turns, awaiting to meet the yonder by breaking through. In purgatory, I await entangled, nearly daily trying to break free, to escape. This is no prison sentence, no "Mein Kempf" to go with the lyrics scraped on the walls of the cell. I shan't personalise it, I might become attached and grow emotional claws to hold on. But the written words are clear. In this world, this desolace, I am alone, free to weep, to crawl, to deny, to seethe, to participate, to cower. Existentialism dawned on me recently in my cell. Characterised by a shadow of hopelessness and other nasty feelings that I'd rather not feel but still are part of my available pallet (because I still decide to make use of them in my artistry efforts), the day is a process of getting up and getting through. Occasionally there is a gentle whispering, not nearly loud enough to deafen the silence, but noisy enough to remind me that I can still hear, that I am still here. It's soothing, but as soon as I turn my head towards it, the quiet that had never left returns and I am once more left sitting by myself. This is the only opportunity I have of remembering that I am forgotten. No one knows I am here. I used to not know too, then my frontal lobe developed and my place was revealed. Its purpose is yet unknown to my physical eyes, but in the greater scheme of things, I am there, certain.

In the evening, through the bars of the cell I can see a lone street light, lit. When I watch it, it flickers and this exposes the flying specks of dust orbiting around their star. I'm somewhere in that solar system, probably in a prison cell too, wondering why. There is nothing else to wonder about. When it's cold, I huddle in a corner with a make-believe blanket. My breathing is then visible, an expelling of steam from the mouth of a dragon that never really had a chance to live. Another one of my fantasies is hearing footsteps. I sometimes hear them through the same ear and from the same area that the whispering comes from. But like the latter, it disappears when I turn my head, when I try to trap the perpetrator into my net of judgmental sight. I haven't caught anyone so far, and I don't expect to, but I still do it. It's a habit of being for so long nowhere in particular. There is no certainty, everything is a blur, so any expectation would become lost in fog or amongst the crowds. There are other people here. I am whispered that they are my brothers, but they are faceless, they don't look anything like me. I get the feeling that many of them are in their own prison cells but they are always free when I watch them circle the street light. Shadows dance as it flickers and it makes whatever they are doing that much more mysterious and odd. Watching them, I found myself circling in the middle of the room, trying to copy them, but I wasn't getting anywhere because I was nowhere. So I stopped, but I still watch them now and then. But no one looks back at me. Sometimes they look at my feet, but I get the sensation that they are looking through me for the moon or some other celestial object they can orbit around.

All time is in this piece of fresh avocado I present. The inertia is broken in my ambling from bar to bar, yearning, pretending. I have my dream of the day. I am an astronaut floating in space, sans the suit, traversing distances that are relatively insignificant. I am a light, or inside a light, and I watch as faces I obviously recognise but fail to identify shimmer into view only to fade the next second. I am whispering back to the gentle whispering, telling it that I want to know where it comes from, and it replies by repeating the same question I ask it. I am in front of a glass through which I see the flickering street light, the orbiting, the circling, and then I see my silhouette trapped in the glass like some painting I wouldn't want on my personally autographed mirror walls. When the awakening comes, I simply see the light from the street light for a longer few seconds without flickering. My eyes widen then, because I can see more. Light lights the way and grants me vision. I cannot see in darkness, which is why I have been blinded for so long. I probably scared the gentle whispering and the footsteps away through my rash actions or my lack of initial acknowledgment. I couldn't see. I have a heart though, and because I couldn't see, I have anchored it until further notice, i.e. until I can be free and see and let it beat. When I awaken, and I look out at the brothers going in circles, I pull. I pull because I want to join them. I pull the chain because their own version of this great tragedy appears to at least be more mobile than mine. That makes it interesting, I suppose, and more bearable.

Despite my imprisonment and my settling into this null world as if it were my home, I still yearn to escape. Even after so long here, I do want to leave. Comfortlessness is comforting only until I realise that there is no comfort in it. Contradictions... there is an ample amount lying around in the recesses of my mind, by the bars, in my dreams, around the street light. Somehow I am anchored into a prison from which I may not leave. Here, I am condemned. I have to confront my past, not because I have to, but because I cannot let myself not do it. I cannot see anything different but darkness until I face the light. Dancing. It helps sometimes to put myself in the non-ritualistic mood that is required of me for such realisation. If only those brothers of mine would be more empathetic towards me. If only they could see me, maybe they could tell me how to find myself amidst all the black and the undone. Because, I feel abandoned. I feel an emotion of loss. No one is here. Not even me. This makes me sad. One question arises, in many forms, though. Who is the dragon? Who is the astronaut? Who is the brother? I float there in the yonder, right by my side, and I wait with open arms for my return.

Rêve(lation)

All alone then, I had to find some meaning
All alone I, sat down and cried.
All alone I, never found that meaning,
In the center of the pain I held inside.

I ask myself, why, I do what I do.

Outside my mind there's places I've never been
And walking in those worlds I'd never be seen
For people are sleeping, people are blind
In circles they run, out of their mind.

This dream we think we're living
Crosses worlds that are ephemeral.
We try to find its meaning
But we are sleepwalkers in peril.

Oh, where are we going
But the same places again
That we have never left...
When we walk and we are not awake
We're lost in our own space
Getting to each and every race
To win
Nothing.
N o t h i n g.

But we are determined to see
And so we shall
And the walls will crumble
And the seas will flood
And the winds will gust
And the world will fall
And our dream will end
And we'll wake up
And smile.

440

Does it matter for the heart who it loves?

Look at me, talking about love as if I even know what it is.
Some say you must have broken your heart
Before you know what true love is.
But isn't love always true?

Sympathy
The world's my little place to come and crawl into.
It's my little cave where the rays won't hit me.
But it's dark.
It always will be where there are walls
Where there are pits into which I can fall.
And I can cry
I can swim the rivers in my tears
I can make an ocean and disappear
Beneath the waves I'll lie asleep
Until I drown.

And even then, I'll hear this song
I'll dream about a day that's gone.
I'll mourn my loss of life and light
And my turning towards night.
I'll reminisce on times I tried
I'll stare ahead, refuse to fight
Refuse to give up my place of safety
My own humanity
My own protection from the sea
Of my own sadness.
I refuse to let the world tell me who I am.
For not even it knows what it is
Because it isn't even there.

What will be
When you will not love me?
What will be
If you leave from my life
I'll feel like a star fallen into an abyss.
I still won't know who I am
Who to call, who to replace you with.

My white thoughts, not made so by the snow outside
But by the colour of the flag I hold up.
I cannot charge into a war of passions
Because I cannot call it art and speak truth
And all I want is to speak truth, to be real
To be who I am.
Is it a tragedy?
When did this become two things?
When did being become a question?
And why?
Across this bridge I walk with my surrendering flag high
Aware of the ditch that I cross,
The fissure in the landscape I had tried so hard to close.
My palms, wounded, now hold on to the ropes along the sides
And my feet sway on the planks.
They may give way
And I may fall into the fissure
And die.
I close my eyes. Who is it that sits beneath the tree at the end?
The tree I cannot see, the tree from which I breathe.
Is it her? Character? A she? No, a tree, or what we may call it.
Branches, roots, leaves, a home for many
And the representation of character
With its shadow being the reputation that hides away always from the sun.

What did I write?

Cracks In The Walls

From here, they look like tiny Lego pieces, all the same off-white colour with a faded orange stripe. These apartment buildings, home to a slew of people that I never knew, rise up in ordered lines. The rectangular windows are equidistant from each other and as they dot each storey of these homes, it becomes a message in Morse, a cry for help. With my two eight-year old feet planted on a grassy descent, facing away from civilisation, I look at the camera, hands on hips. My childish smile – unaware of the truth behind me – turns into a smirk that I see now, some ten years later, to be a question: what happened?

Today, there are cracks in the walls that used to be my home. The security that they once provided, the warmth during winter and the shelter during storms, remain but memories of a place I know does not exist anymore. The process of leaving Romania, leaving childhood, leaving my home and learning about the “real” world in New Zealand shattered the window through which I looked out and put a filter in its place. Romania was not a comfortable place to live in with its corruption, its disorganised system of government, its apathetic politicians, its victimised mindset and its overall squalor. Blame the communist dictator Ceausescu for his totalitarian regime. Blame the gypsies who are marginalised and look for food in the rubbish dumps. Blame the people emigrating for not loving the country enough. Spit on the ground in frustration at the wretch of a life you live – no one is going to clean it up. Blame every single other person, except yourself.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had stayed in Romania. How much would my family and friends have changed? Would my mind be as open as it is today? I don’t like to dwell on the ‘what if’s because they inevitably distract me from the reality that I do enjoy and appreciate life. But I imagine that, when seen from an unlike perspective, my experience of the world would have differed quite dramatically.

Romania – a simple place when viewed from the curious gaze of a little boy with eyelashes girls would kill for and a face that looks a little bit too much like his mother’s. A boy with a happy childhood, because what else would you call it when his grandmother ties both ends of a rope to two branches of a tree to make a swing because the metal ones in the nearby kindergarten were vandalised and broken past the point of repair; or when his brother builds a tower of bricks around him so that he only has enough room to poke his head out and smile as his mum takes a photo on his eighth birthday, the same day he would witness a solar eclipse at 1pm. These snapshots are not few in quantity, because they fill about ten photo albums of family history. But their quality, their ability to preserve a reminder of childhood joy for a teen to revisit as he matures, is what really indicates their value to me.

I find myself looking back at these photos to relive the emotion of the tale they tell. I used to feel nostalgic within the first few years of living in New Zealand as I was still reluctant to accept that the reason we moved was because it was better for us here. My childhood ended on arrival in this foreign place with palm trees, clean roads in good condition and personalised houses, as opposed to small unkempt streets between copy-pasted apartment buildings that Ceausescu had built in an attempt to attract workers to the cities. The contrast was and still is quite stark.

My coming of age story thus has elements of adjusting to a whole new culture and keeping from being absorbed into it. I’m not a Kiwi. I’m not a Romanian either, despite my saying that I am when asked because although I empathise with what is going on back home, I do not share the survivalist view that the world is cruel and unfair. And yes, Romania is still home, because so much of what I knew to be happiness originated from that place and those people there that were close to me. You can tell this from the number of smiles in the photos, and the amount of smiling they in turn cause.

Growing up is magical for any child, for they cannot see the cracks in the walls. So much of society is built upon righting past wrongs and realising a world better for the next generation. Children only find the present, and what a gift it is to them. What can we say about ourselves then, as humans, when we take that away because we lost ours, too?

Deconstruction

The dust has stopped settling which leads me to think that deconstruction is a process of transformation instead of a momentary event with a clear cleavable beginning and end. Walls that made rooms into aloof spaces now fall and bridge an inexistent gap that has puzzled me into mistaking reality. This gap, the line that separates the two innocent dots in the obelus, isn't really there, despite appearances. They sure can be deceiving. Or rather, my mind has interpreted it as a sign for division. After all, I haven't figured out how to divide by 0, and I'm no calculator.

The deconstruction of the room may, at first thought, lead me to think that there would be ruins left in the aftermath. Like the ruins of Roman amphitheaters, or the Greek Parthenon, or the remnants of Machu Picchu - places where people have been there, done that, then left whether by force of will, force of nature, force of obliteration or another force entirely (?). But it's not quite like that. The walls that fall (probably similar to the ones Beyoncé sings about in Halo) do not crumble and leave a mess then be abandoned without clear explanation. Their demise gently filter light in from the other side(s), so as the process occurs, more and more streams of light penetrate the widening crevices.

Forget the symbolic imagery of hope. Walls crumbling down is not an invitation for me to know that I can make changes in my life. It is beyond that. The deconstruction is a freeing of energy, of me, from the walled room of my mind. It is a release of a songbird out of two cupped hands. As the fissures burgeon, I reconnect with Being.

What a fantastic opportunity this is, to awaken and experience Life as a free man.

Remember those walls I built
Well, baby they're tumblin' down
And they didn't even put up a fight,
They didn't even make up a sound.

This deconstruction, I realise, began when I first constructed walls to keep myself from getting hurt as a child. An experience inside a box is not authentic, is not total, because it specifically excludes what is outside, even if it is rain. Thus, the fight for survival has been my search for Life. Amazing how it's been here all along and I never really noticed it until I became so asphyxiated that I had to punch a hole in the wall. This is the door, another hole is the window.

Sometimes, I sit at my desk and look outside. The greyness of the firmament is there, and we both cry. Rain is beautiful.

Walking Through Walls

I am in a room. I know this is a room because there are four walls that prevent me from seeing what is beyond them; thus I am confined to a space that is seemingly separated from what is beyond. These walls serve both to prevent me from witnessing the truth that lies on the other sides but also to protect me from what is there. So I can be scared of what's beyond. Rather, I am scared of losing what is here.

If there were no walls, I wouldn't know where I began and where I ended. I'd just float in space, having to suffer whatever is everywhere because there would be nothing that divides, nothing that protects.

Yet I assume something. I don't actually know that whatever is beyond the walls will hurt me. It is an assumption I make because my mind is scared of death and it knows that what is beyond will might attack me it and kill me it. But I am not my mind and I know this because I am still alive when I don't have thoughts swirling drunkenly in my head. When moments of peace and solitude descend upon me, such as when I have been awake for a long time and my body feels the need for sleep but cannot because I willingly and intentionally stay awake, thoughts reduce in number and intensity because they have much less energy to waste unconsciously. At those times, my world is calm and I know in those moments that I am alive, because I breathe in the crisp air, and I can feel it reach my lungs and then slowly disperse to every cell in my whole body.

So because I'm not my mind, I must be something else? How about, I am.

What lies beyond the walls could just as well be what lies in this room. In that way, the walls serve no purpose but to divide, to separate, and in that case they are separating space. But space is infinite - that's to say, walls cannot divide infinity, so even if mind death lies behind the wallpaper then mind death also lies here, in a different form possibly. There is space everywhere, there is nothing everywhere. This is who I am: nothing - not yet.

And me being in this room is a distraction from the truth. There is no room, there are no walls, there's no division, I am nothing and I am everything. Thoughts need to survive, I simply am, so I can either chase my thoughts away and hit walls and fear getting out of rooms, or I can simply let thoughts be, just like I am. That means there are no walls, and I can walk through, free.