My lips begin to itch, but its a pleasant sort of itch. My body quivers and I'm reminded of an autumn day, an autumn day in which I lied amongst a flurry of leaves, my body shaken with each penetration of cupid's arrows. Arrow after arrow. The ambivalence of the temperature confined me in my own confusion, and yet I was complacent... complacent with the way the sky engulfed the sun; complacent with temporal nature of the smile on my face. I question the infinite mystery of things, this vague notion of being. As Baudelaire said, "there are sensations whose vagueness does not exclude intensity, and there is no sharper point than that of infinity."
I consume another opiate, mesmerized by the effervescense of an act I have such control over, as if everything is internal, the external nature of things being in my own hands. A radiance and a warmth surges in a swelling gesture, hiding another sort of pain. I can create selfless vanity, loosing control of myself as I elude the external.
This narcotic induced effect reminds me of excess. The autumn breeze, swirling around my subsconscious, meets a cooler, more present, northern air.
I am taken back to New York City, several months ago. Walking along Madison Avenue, next to my father, I see a shivering woman. Her face is glazed with tears, crust around her mouth, eyes pointed toward a non-spiritual mecca, an infinity that reaches closer and closer to her desperation. I cast a cold glance in her direction; cold outwardly, inwardly empathetic. I hate the urban sensibility I have developed while living in Philadelphia, one that decries attention to the homeless, advocating only a path of ive-league-paved ambition. My father reaches into his wallet to give her a few bills, and she responds with a knowing movement of her mouth, unable to articulate her gratitude, unable to communicate her situation, and unable to draw an affinity between her indebtness and her precarious situation amongst the monolithic stability of the skyscrapers that surround her.
"I can't explain what seeing that woman did to me," my father begin to say. His eyes began to water, and I at first questioned the genuiness of his gesture. "I just bought your mother a new wedding ring, we go to nice dinners, we live in excess, and then I see a poor woman like that..."
I was unshaken by the spectacle, its something I see every day living in West Philadelphia. But I was shaken by the naivety of my father's sincerity, the innocense of his epiphany. I walked nearer to his side, feeling so close to him, and yet so distant.
I find myself indulging in excesses, particularily in more my manic phases. Too much drinking, eating, spending, etc etc. Absorbing myself in excesses of conflict and relationships, just to reassure an absence... in some attempt to superimpose parallel entities. To combine my shadow and my own physical being.
One love is never enough. One drink is never enough. One night is never enough. One consequence is never enough.
Infinity terrifies me, so I enclose myself in this moment - this moment sharpened by exactly what I'm avoiding.
I consume another opiate, mesmerized by the effervescense of an act I have such control over, as if everything is internal, the external nature of things being in my own hands. A radiance and a warmth surges in a swelling gesture, hiding another sort of pain. I can create selfless vanity, loosing control of myself as I elude the external.
This narcotic induced effect reminds me of excess. The autumn breeze, swirling around my subsconscious, meets a cooler, more present, northern air.
I am taken back to New York City, several months ago. Walking along Madison Avenue, next to my father, I see a shivering woman. Her face is glazed with tears, crust around her mouth, eyes pointed toward a non-spiritual mecca, an infinity that reaches closer and closer to her desperation. I cast a cold glance in her direction; cold outwardly, inwardly empathetic. I hate the urban sensibility I have developed while living in Philadelphia, one that decries attention to the homeless, advocating only a path of ive-league-paved ambition. My father reaches into his wallet to give her a few bills, and she responds with a knowing movement of her mouth, unable to articulate her gratitude, unable to communicate her situation, and unable to draw an affinity between her indebtness and her precarious situation amongst the monolithic stability of the skyscrapers that surround her.
"I can't explain what seeing that woman did to me," my father begin to say. His eyes began to water, and I at first questioned the genuiness of his gesture. "I just bought your mother a new wedding ring, we go to nice dinners, we live in excess, and then I see a poor woman like that..."
I was unshaken by the spectacle, its something I see every day living in West Philadelphia. But I was shaken by the naivety of my father's sincerity, the innocense of his epiphany. I walked nearer to his side, feeling so close to him, and yet so distant.
I find myself indulging in excesses, particularily in more my manic phases. Too much drinking, eating, spending, etc etc. Absorbing myself in excesses of conflict and relationships, just to reassure an absence... in some attempt to superimpose parallel entities. To combine my shadow and my own physical being.
One love is never enough. One drink is never enough. One night is never enough. One consequence is never enough.
Infinity terrifies me, so I enclose myself in this moment - this moment sharpened by exactly what I'm avoiding.
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
One of many theories that I constantly tinker with is the hypothesis that we're always being tested. We're tested by the Godhead, we're tested by evil forces, we're tested by the streets. Truth is, unfortunately, subjectively evolving, we'd like to think that it's static when the moment serves us.
Your Father seems a compassionate man. Because he was selfless, his Self may be realized...
Infinity. The concept makes me think of starlight, rays travelling through space in all directions forever. The starlight we see on earth is millions of years old. We're made of the same stuff as the stars. Does space equal time? Our physical existence seems to bend space. Water bends light. "You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you." We are the river(?)
According to Heraclitus, there was no permanent reality except the reality of change; permanence was an illusion of the senses. He taught that all things carried with them their opposites, that death was potential in life, that being and not-being were part of every wholetherefore, the only possible real state was the transitional one of becoming. He believed fire to be the underlying substance of the universe and all other elements transformations of it. He identified life and reason with fire and believed that no man had a soul of his own, that each shared in a universal soul-fire.
hm, makes me think...
so what have you been up to? how was your weekend? working on your art? do you have any work online that i could see? i would love to see some of your work.