Category: being

being, short fiction, writing

The waves

You frolic at my circumference, wet your toes at the edge of me, and you think you know me? Shall we examine our existence? Having splashed in my shallows you claim to have touched my depths? Poets, not the moon, have me falling, crashing, frothing fiercely, but, I was only arching my back against the sky, and there is so much sky. These waves heave my interminable sigh, and have heard you in your panicked swarms come bathe to assuage your peeling husks blistered by the rub of coarsely moving time. 

Now I push back ceaselessly from the madness of the land. I lived there aeons past, before memory, before you. Traces of me are cut into rock there. I have been in places you have not yet stepped. Once your mountains were folds beneath my feet, your vast forests, kindling I pressed to the pulp that ant-like, you unearth and burn. You burn everything that’s good. Your forests, your books, your peacemakers, your enemies … yourselves.

You burn everything.

Granted, we have had our moments. I was happy when you first built boats. How we played. I even pulled you along when your arms grew weary. What fine times we had? Trade began well. Too soon sharing begat greed

It seemed then that we wanted the same things?

I recall the fragrance of oranges, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg and olives freshly pressed. I held those memories while you loaded your holds with humans, then guns, travelled to distant shores, and burnt them as well. And you say I am unfathomable? 

Photo by koko rahmadie

I gave you the antedeluvian age. Not being a land creature, I retreated. I was young and foolish. I should have stayed, kept you drowned. But, you were always too far gone and one cannot drown the dead. Granted, there were other forces as well. You have quantified and measured all but one. The force that brings you here. Why do you come to this shore? Why stare at the edge of the world?

Homer made Gods of men at sea. Most I spat back. My taste is not for men. Giving me a name will not pacify my nature. Keep your trident, your trinkets and toys. You do not know me. I am a stranger to you still. My tempests will swallow Empire after Empire. I remember the Phoenicians, I knew Odysseus, saw Troy fall, watched Mark Anthony’s fleet burn at Actium, blew the Northmen to the New Wold five centuries before Columbus sailed the America’s or Diaz rounded Cape Horn, marvelled at the Treasure Fleet of Zheng He. I watched nations rise and fall and the rivers of blood that bleed from power did not make you stop. Instead the fires of hatred forged bigger guns and bombs which took flight holding the power of the sun, your new light of the world that poisons us still. Even so, I will remain after you are done with your toys, your noisy politics and rattling sticks.

I learned you too could roar.

All knowing man, my child. All your sandcastles, games, your frolicking at the edges of what you think of as the best of me-all these aeons you saw just waves, thought I had come out to play? Weary of your trifling games, I feel a surge rising …

Photo by Ray Bilcliff

My nature is deeper than those frothy collapses caught in the curve of endless verbs. I am the alpha erasing the edge of the omega of your world. Unspoken still, I persist.

being, short fiction

Declaration

Here is an event which it
has become my duty to
declare:

all my life I have
been searching for the world, then, while it hurtled through space at roughly 107 000 km/h with a spin speed of aproximately 1670 kp/h (it matters where on the rock you stand) then … this flower smaller than a small coin, caught a bit of the flare that fumed and spat from the sun eight minutes ago, and held it, like a promise, and though we move and in that movement find the earth to be such a place where pain and grief find us, no matter where we look, then also we must remember that it will pass. Everything passes.


And we are little more than caretakers of brevity called upon to do the impossible, to make a life with a brief spell on a brutal rock. But, here is where we have surprised, even ourselves- we have found beauty where there ought to be none. Are we not remarkable? Are we not better than we thought?

being, philosophy

The elementary heaviness of being

I watched a plastic bag dance in a breeze. The way its creased grey skin responded to the air felt remarkably familiar. Gravity is the heaviness that living on earth imposes on the body. If the soul expands and comes close to the surface of the skin, the weight of air upon it is enormous, and often escapes as a sigh. Let us call this force by its real name, life. There are two forces working simultaneously on our existence. There is the downward thrust of gravity, the earth force that keeps us on the ground, ‘grounded’ as some call it. Pushing out against this from deep within us is the force of our own being, some call this force ‘soul’. A silk balloon in the centre of a stone. We measure living, not coincidentally, by the gravitational ellipses of our planet around the sun and all the while the soul expands proportionately outward. We begin our lives battling the physical force of gravity. We are easily toppled, must struggle to crawl, learn to walk and in our youth must endure scrapes and knocks as we collide with the earth in our endeavour to move with speed and grace on top of it. During these early stages of being human we are mostly muscle and identify strongly with the body we inhabit. Then we begin to hear the whisperings of our soul, realising we are more than the flesh and sinews we have thus far fed and adored. The soul begins to inflate from within. Physical routines lose their novelty and we notice the slow decay of the body in wounds that take longer to heal, aches that linger and teeth that crumble. Falling scares us, our mortality takes hold, caution makes sense. In the following decades the people we love begin to die. The once eternal vigour of youth is gone in a flash. Exercise is not what we do for fun but for staying alive and sometimes we wonder why  we persist. Easier to yield to the downward thrust. We push back. Gravity crushes us in the end, grinds our particles to dust. It always wins. Thankfully, as the body grows weaker, the soul grows stronger, if you pay attention to it. You realise it has always been there and has been fighting the battle since day one. It defies gravity, it brings nobility to living when the muscles do not. Living is not an act of ascension. Fairytales invite us to reach for the stars, to fly, to soar, to reach great heights but in truth we are just dropping by slow degrees of entropy from the womb to a hole in the ground. We begin by descending and the soul provides the downward journey with narrative, with a history of presence.

Some of us love airports because they remind us that the soul is made of lighter stuff. We find ourselves looking up from whence we came and the homesickness feels like a dream we can’t yet pronounce. Some of us have embraced our fate and will mine the earth to teach the soul that like coal or gold or iron it is trapped. Some of us walk on the ground and watch birds with a longing beyond our present comprehension. None escape the velocity of life. Whether we dig, walk or fly we move in the direction of ourselves. The laws of physics depend on location and direction. We are always going somewhere, toward something, from some place, but in truth these are irrelevant signposts for the space within. Scientists cannot locate consciousness because it is like looking for the act of looking. Some people dispute the existence of the soul. It doesn’t matter. I’m not trying to prove it exists, or anything really. I’m just working on my narrative, like a plastic bag caught in the wind.

 ​

 

 

20170415_104116-1