Insanity

“I'll take crazy over stupid any day.” 

Joss Whedon

~

It feels as if there's a wall preventing me from expressing myself. I don't know what to think and I don't want to think anymore. So, instead of feeling this, whatever this is, I'm going to talk about it. And I won't feel anything.

He was born and raised in a country drowning in terrible feelings and poisoned ideas. As a child, growing up, he could not express what he truly felt or thought because it wouldn't be accepted. He wouldn't be accepted. And since the most essential need for kids is recognition, he, of course, didn't get any of that. Thus, a kid, he remained.

He wasn't doing well. He stayed that way until he was bruised by his own clothes, friends he would have died for. He wasn't doing well after that either. It started with 'under the bed' becoming 'in the mirror' but, eventually, he was able to see the monsters, whether actual or potential, in everyone, and everything. 

And then, something magical happened. Or, at least, that's why I hear him telling himself at night, that the world is rotten but he somehow found a loophole, that everything is linked and it all makes sense, that love and faith and art the strongest forces in the universe, and that he's one of their freedom fighters. But is he really? Or is he just a small lie in the matrix of manipulation?

So what's the problem? What's your problem? Are these your eyes? Is this your voice? Do you even have a voice? What have you lost? What have you lost? What have you become? What are you hoping for? Why the hell are you here? Why are you not feeling anything? Are you okay?

The most famous, non-technical definition of insanity is the following:

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” 

Does that make sanity doing the same thing, over and over, expecting the same result? Or is it 'different things' and 'same result'? Or perhaps 'different things' and 'different results'?

More importantly, what does that make you? Is it wrong to be insane in a mad world? What's the difference between people who talk to themselves out loud and others who keep it in? Is it terribly unusual for someone to envision their own personal world and talk to the fictional people in it? Is it okay? Is it that different from what you do? When you talk to the images in your head, of those human beings you don't truly know, these people you refer to as friends and family, when you weave this subjectively imagined world of ideas and feelings about them, is that okay?

He wasn't okay. The bridge between physical and psychological pain was nonexistent because they were both the same land suffocating under anxious heartbeats disguised in deeply distraught water-waves filling his lungs. It is also said, in my head, that to switch between sanity and madness you must learn the difference between leading your mind and being led by it. Good luck. He wasn't okay. I'm not okay either. Yeah, me neither. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry this didn't make you feel anything. I can't give you what I don't have myself, when I can't see myself. But that's okay. Everything is gonna be okay, right?

And then, something magical happened.

~

“Awareness is the enemy of sanity, for once you hear the screaming, it never stops.” 

Emilie Autumn

Flow

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.” 
Honoré de Balzac

~

The theta-gamma-solfeggio stream runs the waves beneath the dream. In truth, we are nothing. Silence the delusions. Silence the noise. Focus. There is only the absence of you. And this. Closed eyes, open. Open eyes, close. Inhale the invisible rose. Beneath the wave, a heart once dove. In truth, I am nothing. Beyond the wave, the pupil moves in wonder. Jump into the void. The music stops. The links are absent because you are not me. You are not nothing. But I'm trying to show you what it means to be meaningless. Let me. Are these your eyes? I want this to be different. Are you?

In here, there is no you. In here, there is no me. There is a breathless song of a fraudulent freedom fighter trying to break free. In here, I know that there, there is where I want to be. In here, I think that here is gone and there is no there, that there is nowhere. Now take a pause. Pause. I said pause. What do you see? A very exact and delicate nothingness.

The voices rumble in your head, melancholic and misread. What is the origin beneath the concept that drives you out of equanimity? How uniquely insignificant is your identity? Are you searching for yourself in the corners of your imagination or are you forging this painting with red crayons in your eyes? Where are you on the envy/self-righteousness spectrum? I see that you are split between transparency and paralysis. No pause. Is there a link between the meaningful and the meaningless? I see you unattached from the concepts you replace your experience with. Now tell me, which is the holiest of all, Love or Faith?

The waves are as quiet. This dream is on repeat. In truth, I am like that Nightwish song, deep silent complete, drowning quietly in a completely unsound world beneath bursting bubbles of beautiful music.

So take this, please. Wrinkled face. Unpolished eyes. Broken nose. Broken smile. Crooked neck. Asymmetric heart. Darkened lungs. Shattered blood. Take it. I don't want any of this. I can't even capture my own moment, my own feeling, the glass that bleeds underneath the skin of these words that still can't spell home. Please take it and leave. I wrote this because I couldn't breathe. It's what happens when you unplug a dysfunctional brain. Raw data of a soul redefining refined insanity under the moonlit resonance of artless synchronicity.

Call it flow. Name it transient hypofrontality. None of that matters. It is but the thought of death that makes you dance - though all this crap comes without a beat. The origin is not the key. What matters is what you see, what you see in the patterns, the ones that move in you as you float toward your purpose, or away from it. My dance has always been about autumn leaves, about holding them on the surface of my eyes before they hit the ground that is me.

Enough. Enough is more than enough to keep you grounded. And all this is nothing. Nothing is more than enough for me to stay true. And I'm not doing well because I know that alone is all I'm ever going to be. Alone in my mind, with a mind that writes meaningless words on an empty canvas and then falls from his daydreams into the fetal position to sleep inside the letters' curls. But these letters are not you. These letters are not you.

The waves are gone. This dream is on repeat.

This dream is on repeat. And you're not here with me. You're not here with me.

You're not here.

You're not.

You.

~

“If you've never eaten while crying you don't know what life tastes like.” 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Chocolate

"There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." 

C.G. Jung

~

In what concerns the choice between vanilla and chocolate ice-cream, he codes the first with 'V' and the second with 'C'. V reminds him of the fall from grace and the loss of purity. C reminds him of the glow, the glow of the dark side. He chooses V after convincing himself that the glow is truly that of the hidden light of people living in darkness. This makes him wonder why the shop doesn't offer CV ice-cream in the menu and call it Life. Deep down, on the surface, he knows that he just prefers the taste of vanilla. Or does he? Shortly after, he lights a cigarette and then uses the light behind his eyes, the one he licked off the tip of blazing ash, to observe his tentacles. Again, he wonders. He wonders if he is a squid or an octopus. He already knows that he is a squid because he thought of it first and he is definitely not in a self-deceitful mood. Or is he? Upon pondering the significance of the respective colors of black-blue squid-ink and black octopus-ink, he finds his tentacles metaphorically patting him on his now reassured back of a squid. He whispers to himself, in the sarcastic tone of rudimentary intelligence he despises: "It's okay. it's okay." A second later, after subtly extinguishing the flame of a potential rebellion in Stress Level District, he considers the possibility of coming up with a joke about a squid that likes vanilla. But right then or a fragment of a second later, he notices the salivary metaphor, just sitting there in the wet white glow, waiting to expose the contents of the squid's black and blue feelings on paper-like ice-cream. However, a young and forgotten voice interrupts the trailing train of thought. The train makes its infamous whistle, a lullaby of cryptic words in the supposedly distant cigarette smoke. The indifferent child is just standing there on some random rail in the railway. He looks to his left at everyone he loves as they attempt to survive an overwhelmingly beautiful and ugly Reality. And then he slowly shifts his head to the right: a comfortable, colorless bed, a silent, color-shifting window, and a comforting, infinitely-colored screen - The realm of Fiction greets thee with the infinite hope of lucid daydreams. Look at me. This is where you belong. Otherwise why would this fictitious speech bear your voice? The train's whistle returns, moving upward in curly lines of smoky ink, blue from his quasi-closed lips and black from the sleepless nights, nights glowing like arched lamp posts reaching up his inflamed skin to the purple light suspended in his eyes. The child's mind screams 'jump' but his heart writes it off in lowercase letters. He imagines the swing of an old pendulum hanging onto nothing. Left, right, reality, fiction, love, dreams, death, void, stress, security, people, him, cruelty, metaphors, delusion, illusion, purpose, identity, love, right? Jump? Where? What does a baby squid write on vanilla ice-cream? Reality or Fiction? What a terrible joke...

What if I don't jump? If the train is real and I am fictional, it won't hit me. If the train is fictional and I am real, it won't hit me either. If we're both real, I'll be dead in a few seconds. But what happens if we're both fictional?

Blood. Void. Rewind. Love. Faith. Purpose. Become.

If this is fiction, am I the kid or the train or both - or the distance in between? Am I watching or drawing or both - or neither? Am I the unmentioned elements in the questions or the potential fruit of the tree above their roots - ? Are you listening to the sound of the train or are you some writing writing in the smoke - or are you the sudden void after every question?

~

"What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate." 

C.G. Jung

Sleep

“In a mad world, only the mad are sane.”
Akira Kurosawa

~

The echo behind the whisper in the voice told me that the meaning of the meaning of life reveals itself in those colored bits outside the lines.

Do you see them?

Now do you see the artist's hand tearing through the painting? It throws a spear into your left eye because it wants you to see it right. It wants you to get out of your supposed self, zoom out, and see the second painting, the picture of a recollection of a bloodshot awakening.

Now go back to the first one.
Do you smell the blood on your cheeks?

This is the blood of the heart of the heart of the matter, the co-authored fabric of a waning soul as it weaves waves of scented verses, a red and wrinkled rhyme, a poem on your face.

Truth is, broken borders are gateways for the gallant, to embrace the patterns beneath the chaos, to hold the pulse in the blood of the heart of the heart of the matter that has nothing to do with matter.

So can you hear it? It's knocking on the door behind you, like the wind of sinusoidal hope fading in and out of faithful light, through the only keyhole you've ever really known.

Yeah. Okay. Now what? What do I do with all these words?

[...]

How do I turn it off? How do I make it stop? Why am I thinking about so many things that I don't really want to say? I don't want to get it right anymore, I just want to get it. I want to say what's really going on. I want what's inside to come out unchanged even if all that I am left with is noise. I want the words to honestly reflect who I am without all the games and illusions. I want to make sure that I am not a fraud, that I am not a growing cancer of fabrications. I want to be real. I don't want to be a well-told lie about the content of an empty shell. I want to be real. I don't want fiction anymore. I want to be real. Why won't anyone teach me how to be real?

[...]

What a sad way to wake up. The pain brings you to your knees. You're all alone - just like you always were. And all these metaphors you take shelter in are just as weak and broken as you are. Just go back to sleep.

Live on.

I can't anymore.

~

"He who lives more than one life, more than one death he suffers."
Oscar Wilde

Awe

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” 

Rudyard Kipling

~

I was frozen face down, my nose nearing a centered hug to the edge of the pavement, and life's bare foot thundered down on the back of my head. Reddish retrocausal lightning ensued in a bloodied painting with no title. The shattered fabric of the crushed brain dyed the sidewalk dust with the dry dew of the paradoxical void - a silent story read in between the lines of cobblestone about a broken face of a soul that wrote itself off onto the empty memory of a conceptual black hole that sucked life's misstep into the razor-light mirror-like shredder I was hiding behind my eyes. And thus the only hug was that of a two-dimensional bear-trap set to the seventh Solfeggio frequency folding life's knee into counter-clockwise oblivion. The scent was that of frozen concrete melting at the touch of the eccentric lullaby of a victim of anti-heroism, an artless artist with ink flowing from the edge of his hair to the shadowy sunset of life's heel. What you heard was the melodic ink, a rhyme and a tale about the minute difference, all delicate and frail, between the hellish curtains and the holy veils, the ruptured mirrors and the punctured grails, the conceptual twist of the maze-like tails and the paradigm shift of the wind in the sails,

Adjusting.

Speak of necessary fine-tuning to the projector of meaning before the story ends, beneath the pattern that bends under the weight of reality settled on the surface of the black swamp in your hair. Speak to the night of the morning pale, the edge of colored thoughts and humid lyrics about the reconstructed taste of dawn in the tea and the Pyrrhic victory of two ends converging behind the illuminated bitter-sweetness of smoke. 

Failing.

There are no words.

Some see words as series of clawing strikes to the face of existence attempting to rip it of its raw beauty, leaving lettered scars in a light of diminished value. That's why they say that there are no words, why silence is revered in the realm of beauty.

Obviously, I disagree.

There are words. And when placed in the right way, for the right reasons, the words, presumably read at the right time, will change both you and your existence. And they will then tell you that it is up to you to change the world.

Re-adjusting.

My words often fail to make it back from the realm of metaphorical resonance. They fail to make a difference. But we are who we are and it is what it is. No.

Now, what if we could see the different scales that map the maze of mankind, the magical axis of imaginary time, and the bright light of childlike wonder floating in between the moment and the while - what happens then?

The iris was frozen in the labyrinth it holds, and life put a knife through its back.

So it poured its story of melancholic tears in the thirsty lines between cockroach mountains. No.

I found the axis set to the beat of my heart.

And I discovered that the light was made of metaphors. 

I opened the map at every turn and every curl and I kept asking myself, what do you see?

What do you see? What do you see?

I saw the map staring back at me.

I happened.

And now, there are no words.

~

"Once we realize the extraordinary power we have to compose our lives, we'll move from passive, conditioned thinking to being co-creators of our fate."

Jason Silva

Check

“Boring is the right thought at the wrong time.” 

Jack Gardner

~

Seize the moment, if you can perceive it. Wait but what if you're running short on moments? What if you have the wrong glasses on? What if everything is monochrome and you're invisible? What happens to moments that never make it out of time?

Let the moment fill you. Transform the edge of your skin into a boundless ocean of existential stupor. Write about the unpredictable high side of the melancholy before the feeling is gone. There is a light and it never goes out. But why?

This is a moment. Can you read it? Can you feel it? Is this your voice or mine, your mind or mine? Are we sitting on a bench and having a conversation or are you just messing with my head? Who are you, anyway? And why would you put a comma there? Where? Where are we? And why doesn't any of this make sense to the suffering?

Who cares, anyway? I'm not unhappy. I'm content that I understand how and why things are the way they are. I'm happy because I have had the chance to meet wonderful people in my life. I care about moments because they're kind of all I have. Moments either symbolize the start or the end, though they usually appear masked as whatever's happening in between. 

Nothing's happening in between. It's all a game. But people matter. No, they're just figments of your imagination. No, they're real and it's my duty to take care of them. Society is a ghost concept - you know that. I'm starting to feel that you're the only ghost here. How can you lie to yourself when you know this is all an illusion? I'm not lying to myself; you're lying to me and it's a DELUSION - for the most part. We've been having different versions of this same conversation for years - isn't it time to get over this mundane schizoid monologue? Isn't it time for you to tell me about my real fears and insecurities? Well played, old friend. You're not my friend - you're that nothing in between.

The melody is on repeat. It's always the same note, and almost always the same dialectic on that shore that tells the waves to call it Horizon. Hope and delusion, justice and evil, recognition and selfishness, love and despair, freedom and basically anything that stands in its way. The waves are set to the same old playlist. And none of these people can tell their waves from someone else's. They're all confused because they've forgotten about the light shining down on everything, every moment, every moment.

Some think that life is about turning the duel inside into a duet. Others believe in a third, secret player hiding in the audience. Some people are cold and hungry. Others have died on the highway of trying to figure this whole thing out. Some are born with superpowers they can't see. Others hope they won't die before they get the chance to make them see.

The moment is gone but its echo lives on. In art, in memory, in the quiet commonplace distance that exiles most kind words and that other one, that terribly loud one with the broken road at the end of which everything becomes calm and still, when you find the heart you thought got crushed in between this breath and the next.

Moments come and go. But you are here. You're right here and people change people.

Moments come and go. But I'm here with you, in the undefined meta-level that only meta-levelers understand. We're sitting in the numb paradoxical void of metaphorical euphoria. We're sitting on a bench - with nothing in between.

Seize the moment, if you can feel it.

Your move.

~

"Time is an illusion."
Albert Einstein