Sunday, February 17, 2013

So my head kind of exploded on Saturday night...

Saturday night I was back in Port Macquarie - my home stomping ground - for a mate's 21st. I left the shindig at something-past-one and drove the last half hour back to my folks place, turning the Saturday night mix down that was playing on Triple J.

For a while I tried the silence out. Tried listening to the engine and somehow feeling disappointed that I couldn't. I wasn't driving the Swift; I'd borrowed Mum's car and its quiet hum wasn't enough to sate my mind which had ticked into the treacherous late-night mindset. There was no-one else in the car, so I kind of just started talking out loud. I do this from time to time; it was like painting pictures in my head with words. It's like...like my head was suddenly full of words and I could only say one of them at a time; there was no real plan for the speech or the rambling, it really just happened. And then I got home and realised that I could barely remember any of it. Panicking, I picked up a pen and began scribbling, sitting on the edge of my bed at 2 in the morning, trying to get as much of it down as possible. I think I got about 60% of the original ramble, plus some extra that came as part of the refinement process of having it sit in your head and then try to write it out.

Anyway. I thought the blog would be an appropriate place to put it all.

Begin with sitting, at 2am with a bowl of icecream and a glass of sherry, trying to remember the brain explosion I had on the way home.
Man, I should start recording these things.
Like an angel. An angel made of light to outshine those who Weep. Weeping angel. An angel made of light, with broken wings and scarred hands and memories of life that never was. A voice, but no tongue to speak with, and a song but no lungs. Memories of all that never was, floating between the cracks of what never existed.

Floating amid a sea of stars, adrift in the black void. A hundred million tiny points of light your reference point. You know the way home; you always have. You just have no interest in the known - not tonight. Tonight you long to feel the roar of the Tempest; its sonorus melody to toss you deep into the depths of all you cannot understand. Why? Why seek out the unknowable when all you understand is within your reach; your grasp? You long to be swept away, to feel insignificant behind the raw fury of something you could never hope to control, not even in a million lifetimes of understanding or memory of money. Money? Pah. Value condescends itself on you, bringing assumptions, assertions, ascertations. You forget all too soon of the Great Fear and desert the skyscrapers of wonder and challenge and hope for the apartment blocks of mediocrity and despair.

You clamour and you whisper, to have within yourself value found, but you price yourself as worthless. You desire an open mind, but you only want to spend your time with those who say exactly the same things as you. You forsook the great argument for massing around a tiny one, a tiny thought. You came upon the thought by someone else, but you did not stop to examine it; to think it over. It was never questioned by you. Instead, you swallowed it whole along with the rest; regurgitating it on command like a courting parrot whenever another walked by. Open your eyes. Your voice; your hands; your mind: they were meant for so much more than the incessant babble and wind of the mundane; of this slow crawl through a half-remembered existence.

Break. Break even. Break even on your oath. Come clean with the promise you made, written in flesh and blood between you and the Speaker. The Speaker; the Singer: the one whose voice echoes through space and time and history and mind, like a song you've always known the tune to but never understood the lyric of. You tried to emulate Him once; you screamed into the void of blackest night, but no echo responded. How could it? The expanse stretched above your head; an infinite black dome, spattered with stars like a child with a messy fountain pen.

And by then I had hit my semi-colon usage limit for the day and passed out at 3am.



1 comment:

Come on, leave your epic wordage in the space below. I dare you.