Diary of an unborn writer # 34

(thanks for the pictures goes to ECS Wong - the writer of an amusing travel article - and the Dakota Voice which publishes a horrific story - Celebrating the Earth - The Right Way - thanking God for Man's use of His resources. Joyously randomly ironic it found its way into this entry, tying several of its themes in an orgy of descriminating Godhood . Thanks also to our overmaster Google, for making all of this possible. Dakota Voice has yet to celebrate that. Ahem...to business...)



Something must be done


Outside the central station amidst the Saturday throng, a cello player throbs strings to the sound of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, stopping to thank the passers by that reach down to drop coins in his instrument case. Close by, but far enough to not compete, a squat Chinese lady in a puff body warmer parades around with many signs:

“Only Jesus saves”

“Pray or be damned”

“God never meant it to be this way”

In the cat squeak of her countrymen she aims to enthuse passers-by with her own gospel rhythm: “No wife do it for you, no cigarette; only Jesus, hear me!”

With each ignoring glance her pitches rises in greater thrall to the divine and the Church-speak continues – concatinations of manipulation and the misunderstood drink it like envy and sow its hot humiliating tones on the pedestrians of Amsterdam.



The rainforest is withdrawing at an unprecedented rate – half of it gone in the last thirty years. Beef and soy products – one feeding the other – clearing swathes to feed further bellies to feed grief and anger over a lost heritage we decided wasn’t there for a time. The scope of the disaster is roared out through misplaced headlines and aghast conversations at dinner party tables, consecutive lines daring to out-horror the next in grim sophisticated knowledge of just what is going on.

More species have died in the last century that at any time since humans took to the Earth. We were born into abundance and see it now as torn sacks before our eyes, breathing pity on the disaster we’re too horrified to see. This is not animals or plants or a tragedy for science. It is you and I and forgetting our nature. Of that the Chinese lady at least was aware.

The horror lies in scars as large as your Mother’s forehead, macheted across before she was raped. It lies in turnstile behaviour, the furrowing of crowds down lines others saw fit to imagine for them and have nothing whatever to do with joy. It begins in want and ends in disaster, your Mother may cry but soon she’ll be rid of you, if you turn out the same.

Teenage protestors in long flower dresses stand in hate lines before police and believe their’s is a more sophisticated hunger, a purer sense of anger than that which they are struggling to rip free. Mother weeps as the crowds struggle to defend themselves. Pepper sprayed across the face, arms whipped with batons by servants of the peace. Joanna’s gut curdling shriek that this cannot go on, reported as she peels the label back from her third bottle of the night. Flourescent lights dance across her face and she’s in rage at what she terms the ignorance of police.
She despairs that it will never be enough but knows that trying is all that she and the rest have left. Olive skin glistening on summer morning battle lines. Furious letters sent. She glows in experiences – the dancing, drinking, pleasure in colours kind – loves deeply, cares sincerely but can’t shake the hunger that shakes it all adrift.

We’re in horror at the passion play of a ball set off before our time, how our Mother’s face was ripped and pissed upon, now anxious to make things sane. The anxiety of a million screams for relief, spilling on their Mother’s face yet more guilt and anger and putrid fumes the same that they protest against, by battling the beast they confirm his existence even more.

By battling the beat they lose the rhythm that spoke them free.

If we’re looking for solutions, find a treasure chest to open or walk an unfamiliar way. Because this shattered destiny fix – this horror show make shift and all things better we’ll have ourselves drift in is a treachery of alternative, manipulated by interests we’re not wide enough to see. One empire builds itself in the ashes of another and the builders care not for us, or our Mother, or fairly traded coffee nicely but not too much because you'll bring all of us crashing down. The pillar tipped the moment we forgot that there is more than our survival or summer holidays at stake.

Obama’s smile the better to slash our Mother and waste yet another vain hope cemetery of years.

If we’re looking for solutions as to how all this was begun, please give up that desert cry – the kind that baby-boomer anxious whines dismiss and cry about. That politicians lament over as they create and crucify with cogent blood stain sweeps. And Mother cries the tears that they would torture immigrants to speak.

If we’re looking for solutions as to how all this was begun, please give up that desert cry – the kind sweltering over coloured orphans and off-shot on tourist photographs, marvelling at the intensity of experience poverty provides to our over-privileged, under cut and insufficiently satisfiable lives -

If we’re looking for solutions as to how all this was begun please let’s give up that desert cry

As all that is lost was once won

Please let’s give up that desert cry

That something must be done

Something must be done.

~~~

Diary of an unborn writer # 33

He’s sitting down to write at a desk. It’s the weekend and gazing at himself a year ago, quite a lot has changed. He has written yards and yards of more and less worthy text but looking at the desk is all you need to know about where he’s at. It’s clean. It’s 5pm and he’s not wearing a dressing gown. A picture of his friends back home sits on his desk a pile of book he’s beginning to type out for the long-waited-for collection he’s been promising to get done.

He’s drinking a glass of vitamin juice – the fizzy kind you dissolve in glass. He works eight or nine hours a day as a coach, urging people to get fit. He spends evenings exhausted reviving himself with TV and the occasional cigarette. He has a garden and lives by the countryside. His apartment, all to himself, is large enough to house a few of his past others. He is just beginning to get used to being alone.
He takes walks in the forest, is less alienated by housework. Finds the company of a few friends is enough. His colleagues don’t exhaust him as much as they used to. His manager finds him a little less frustrating but still can’t work him out.

He reads the Guardian online every day. He surrounded by stories of substandard writers and is amazed that something as important as the news is frequently conveyed by entertainment journalists, although it keeps him reading all the same. He turns to Dostoyevsky from time to time, delights in a few passages but finds its length a dirge. He’ll have loved it by the end and grins that it is so juxtaposed to blogging and quick fix stimulation of an internetted life. Though it gives brief happiness from the other dirge of his working day.

In that he’s finding more. Learning to shrug pressure and still engage with daily tasks. He asking himself if he needs to think about the future quite as much, or will it all happen for him. He thinks it’s somewhere in between.

He misses friends and dearly-loved ones but is frightened on seeing them that they are remote from what he values – or perpetuate the same valued things ad infinitum and without variety. He is told that this is what constitutes living, and guiltily concedes that his own life is the same and berates himself this is the case.
He likes to ponder. Loves to write but kills himself that inspiration doesn’t come on demand. He cannot figure out how to construct a life that is useful while still receives the pearls when they come. He’s even more confounded as to how to make it sell.

He loves God, he never knew he did so much until one day he found himself talking like a Jehovah’s witness to a scared wide-eyed friend. He is touched by the infinite and can’t use words to describe how each day is relieved, blessed and inspired by the knowledge that his is a discontented drop in a wide ocean of bliss, and that the latter will sometimes provide a glimpse.

His head sometimes feels like a glass jar with a rubber seal around the edge and experiencing the moments of the glorious let go – when the lid pops and breath surges into the lungs is almost worth the pain of being confined.

Almost.

He would rather write than go to church.

He would rather cry than laugh along.

Cruel jokes seem funnier in the end.

Simple things perplex him mostly.

Long days frighten him so much that he cannot find anything to do.

He is paranoid of living in a trench though berates himself for not jumping in.

His favourite day is a breakfast and meditation and sitting to write at his latop where inspiration flows like waves and focus does not waver for a second. He hopes to touch the hearts of many as he writes, and could not bear to think that this is a tapestry of his own self-indulgence. He tells himself he must illuminate himself before the world gets his rays.

He’s disappearing down a deep and desperate hole.

He knows it’s the best thing for him and happily...

He relents.

He is taken by a wisdom that the least control is the way to get ones way. It’s merely a matter of knowing that getting one’s way is not at all what you think and should rather be surprised by instead of determining the next steps. The organised ones live in a pit of non-surprise, rationalise in terms of their own responsibility and therefore sink or float of seas of guilt, provided for them by those that hope they can be controlled.

There is no control. The tall ones just sit and let the other conrol themselves, then sip on the fine juices of guilt and money spent on its relief. It’s a sick game really and we’re all so blind to the fact that even those that pull its strings believe that they do it for the best of all. Puppets, puppeteer, puppet-maker all locked in a swirling embrace and no one can see that it’s just a play.

He wishes he didn’t take himself so seriously, or that others did not try to do the same to him.

He hates to be treated as a joke.

He loves that he can laugh as others wince and laughs that others can love through so much pain.

Love presents to him enough pain on its own, without the need for a face.

His scars are perjuries to the tomorrow he would like to carve. He needs to feel its pain before he can open into clear blue skies of flying. Otherwise he’ll have trouble leaving the ground.

He skims across the lives of others, cannot bear to feel them as deeply as his own.
Arrogance is a defence against despair at other’s lost-ness. Mirroring his own, his preference is to keep quiet and not be impinged upon or fall over so he may impinge.
He can talk and a whole room can fall silent, until he realises he’s being listened to and stumbles on his words. Amazing that such a thing should be so feared.

He’s a slave to an unspoken past but in speaking makes him feel like a spoiled brat.
It was too much and never enough. Congestion of social intercourse gives him pain in his chest.

He grants that not many see him as illumined as he sees himself though he feels that this is because they do nit listen and in not listening to them, he only ignores himself the more. He is both cursed and bathed in social company.

He would like to be seen as non-complex.

He is preferring to get used to not wanting to be seen. It’s like an itch that he must not scratch.

He would like to write a novel and can see it is being written. He wonders if he’s lazy in not having written more. It’s set in Amsterdam and lasts for twelve hours. It is about him, and friends and fantastical scenes that slip into the sides of every day. He has a feeling he has seen some things because he sat around long enough as others moved on, though realises that others saw as much in moving, or would do in their time.

He finds that wisdom is breathed. Talking about it also gives him pain.
Many people find him five years older than he is.

Others five years the other way.

He has wrinkles under the eyes fro too many computer screens stared at for too much of each day. When he’s at home he feels relaxed and without need to do anything.
Except housework, which he is less alienated by.

He is confused that he writes in an American accent.

He withers in self-pity and rises in joy.

He has stepped in dog shit too often in the same place for a young man
He is only now beginning to smell his shoes.

He will enjoy your company but please leave as you sense his mood begin to change. He will not ask you but merely roll his eyes inwardly at everything you say and cut himself with mental taunts that he doesn’t like you just for now.

When he’s vague he’s thinking. If he’s thinking he’s avoiding and if it’s self-disgust it’s better you were not around.

Writing this is giving him pain throughout his body.

He wonders if a life lived for any reason is enough. Even experience lost its shine the last time he was in France drinking wine and walking in the sun, cooled by the breeze. Dark clouds in his writing could be easily obscured when you talk to him. That’s when he’s being vague.

He’ll be light and forget himself. In times with you and serried others. He’ll embrace you in smiles and steer conversations to benefit all assembled at risk to his own pride. He wonders if it’s possible to make these occasions happen or if we should accept them like gifts.

He wonders and ponders and still the thing’s not done. He’s alone at his desk, in mercy he’ll be found...

Found away and remorsed in himself. Remorse given a place in long fields and covered by the insights he's seen fit to place aside. Warm sun on his face he's realised what they said in great works was true.

There is nothing but love

And nothing but you.

And in this you he likes to type and tell a story that he hopes will touch another's heart. For this comes deeply from his own.

He is only just beginning to trust.

Trust in the power of words to turn a being this way and this. Trust not that it is OK, but that it is deeply wonderful, in ways he can’t allow himself to see.
This writing around the outsides of himself is helping a little bit.

He feels it’s like a slope down which you must keep dead-centre as you ski. The slope is always moving and it’s not clear how to stay on your feet. But you do as long as you keep moving down and don’ look back or you’ll tumble into nonsensicality which may be entertaining for you but it frustratingly obscure.

Still, Beckett got away with it, though that kind of jealousness will keep him at the desk and miss what Beckett held and allowed to flow through him, in spite of any inch of himself.

Sacrifice, he's finding, is a good way to stumble through the haze.

would it be ok if you went away for a time

all of you

don't speak

don't breathe

i'm fine here

it's better i had never sad anything

or you felt the need for a reply

it only made things worse

I fell into something last week. The idea that things could be a certain way and having it torn away is more painful than many experiences i can remember. I am naked in the wind and words lose their grip on me.

She was sweet, but she bit like an acid rose.

Diary of an unborn writer #32

On the way to the Neverending Cafe

He was running around in Leidseplein with large gun in his hand. Red nose and a beautiful costume - shoes like planks and makeup fringing on burlesque with curves and eyes and swirls> Wide yellow and black checked bow tie and paisley shaped eye make up around in each eye - one sloped up the other sloped down. A tear fell from the downward sloping corner of the left eye, so delicate and intricately painted in white and blue you could see the swirls of oceans and eddies of sadness curling on his cheek, that would swell and fall with the clown's expression.

He was swirling on one foot, with the other leg standing at a right angle and even in those boots he made it a ballet. The gun would fall to his side, point haphazardly at strangers and swirl around with his dance, which was slow at first. Arcs of feet and hands and a head: now looking through legs, now curled on the end of the neck and twisted round to the back of him. He was a snake under those comedy clothes - red and black squares on a puffy suit. The face and intricate make up would sneer and grimace and laugh and swirl almost like the eddies in the tear and in morphing it was seamless. Not one followed by another but one endless changing expression.

As the dance progressed the gun whirled faster and face kept up its gnarled then joyful then passive then remorseful poise, whirling in and out of legs the gun changed from hand to hand he's holding it now like a cop, now against his head and now BANG@! he lets a shot off at the crowd. They jump at the blank. The whirls intensify and the shots ring off in stacatto bursts, he's shouting now, the clown and the mania isn't funny any more, or beautiful, except in its most abstract and you want to turn away as the grotesque overreaching arms take the man in folds and contort him ripping off his clothes ripping off his suit, his hat, though makeup and shoes left intact. The gun has fallen to the ground.

He's standing in white all-in-one underwear, belly pouting to the breeze and crowds, half in horror, half scared and the mix challenged as to what will happen next. Will you save us with your act dear clown? Or leave us hanging in the reaches of paralysed despair - your arcs our enemy and your pastiche the frustrated whirls of our every day?

Sadly, he's standing. Challenging the breeze, challenging the whispers of the crowd, challenging each to move away or meet him with a gaze and the gay man, the happy sad man with an outward pouted lip, red nose and eddies on his face flops his upper half to the ground and picks up the gun. Tears springing - really - from his face, smearing swirls - white paint stained with a clear tear and posing, pouting places the gun to his head. Parents take their children away. We watch stunned.

But he doesn't pull the trigger. He just stands waiting until he becomes a standing shows, passers-by remarking on the clothes scattered around and the funny tragic man who's showed us our destiny for a time.

Dear man - you walk away. The next day he was gone.

Diary of an unborn writer #32

"You are not the centre of the world and there are some things in life you can't control"

He said.

I asked him about spirituality and he said that.

You know the big great all absorbing thing.

And he said that.

He's a Spanish man with a bigger being and more sparkly eyes than many care to notice. Humble to the extreme and deeply confident while shy. He was a monk for six years, following the order of Mother Teresa before skipping off in Manchester to work in a prison there.

Now he's landed in a large multinational with a goal of reaping profits from the legions of the rich.

There are whispers, whispering that the New Time has come but that was over a beer and we were way too tired to head out dancing so slept until noon. The Spanish man forgotten, Pixie's red hair falls across my chest.

Joycelyn

She was like a window on a blessed soul that had chosen to engage with you for a time. Joycelyn, the red hair, fair skin angel of a woman. She coloured your life in February, stayed through MArch and by June you were virtually inseperable. An easy, easy time. She would nibble you knuckles as you cupped her hand around her chin, a jaw line delicate enough to break. She had eyes like sapphire, impossible to describe and evry time you look at her you get the shock that she's really there. Joycelyn, waiting for tonight at the black lagoo. Angel face, fire hair, a lady to collapse your soul back in on itself.

Beauty never came so rare and for the time it poured onto your life, you've been a happy sailor that ever spilled rum on to the sea. The pure salt soaking up the alcohol until all that was left was calm.

Fluffy said

Hollywood, my love...