5th Dimensional People

People influence who we are by 'observing' us. Most people 'fix' us by drawing rigid lines around how they perceive us, as if afraid that a rogue bit of self might escape, but occasionally, someone will, by observing us, transform us. Those rare souls have the ability not only to see what is, but also, 'what could be'. They touch our lives with the vision of change they bring. They are different from the rest of the population, but you can't tell what they are just by looking at them. They must be experienced. They are like artists, except their medium is the matter of souls. They are different, almost like fairy-folk or angels. They are among us. They are the people of the 5th dimension.

One leap, one fall, one catch

The problem with a leap of faith is that you never ever know exactly where you will land. You don't know if the ground will hold you, or crumble under the force of your sudden arrival. Only fools rush in, when it comes to faith, but it is everyone's perogative to be a fool at least once in their lives, even if it ruins them forever (my leap of faith: late September/early October 1986).

A fall is a teacher and an education. A fall hurts but it helps. A fall leaves you broken, but stronger. The sad thing is that most people see only the broken part. A fall is a landing that comes too quickly. A fall is a change of direction, sending you on a path you would not have taken otherwise. And that is always a necessary path. A fall is a future 'save' because, a time will always come for you to use that which you have learnt when you fell. (My fall: 17 June 2012)

A catch is perhaps the rarest bird of them all. You see something hurtling towards you, and some instinct that you didn't know you had, makes you put out your hand. A real catch will always knock you completely out of orbit. You stagger under the impact of something you were ill prepared for. And yet, you realize at the same time, that on a subconscious level you have been rehearsed for this all your life. That is its mystery and its paradox. The catch is the Black Swan Event that comes but once in a life time, and you are never the same afterwards.(My catch: 12 July 2009)

You must be mistaken...

You must be mistaken
I'm not he
The guy haunting your memories
The wasted life you see...

Once my veins bore the flow of
his brew of guilt mixed with regret
But the angel came and wiped my brow
And his shame seeped out like fever sweat...

You must be mistaken
That's not me
The fool bound to your expectations
Yearning to be free...

I woke up in his skin one night
I thrashed and thrashed to cope
But someone loosened up the knots
And cut his bonds of rope...

Not Quite #fridayflash fiction - Alice by the Sea

There must be tens of thousands of little girls called Alice in the world. Some of them are not so little and not so innocent, but if we wrote down stories for every Alice that lives, breathes and swallows pills, they could fill a library, all by themselves.

But ask yourself this, how much mileage can you really get out of 'one pill makes you tall' and 'one pill makes you small' withing beginning to repeat the pattern, again and again and again, like a row of warped mirrors in the madhouse.

I'm going to tell you about an Alice that simply got fed up with it all and took a Path of Whispers, away from all the White Rabbits and Mad Hatters and Murderous Queens until she came to the sea.

The wind blew her perfectly brushed blond locks into a wild nest of disarray and the spray of the ocean splattered the unblemished pinkish white skin of her bare feet. She was happy, but still the possibility of being discovered loomed like a distant storm cloud on the horizon.

She did not bring much, but she still had two pills left and without hesitation, she popped the pill that makes you small under her tongue. That was the one that always shocked your senses - a swiftly impacting sensation that made you feel as if your weight had abruptly tripled. Followed by your ears popping and then a disorientating light-headedness, as if the see-saw that had just plunged, now swooped back up again. And finally, that dry burning at the back of the throat. Yep, that was the pill alright.

... and grains of sand were now sharp pebbles and rocks of quartz... The cold brine of the sea, the stabbing sunlight. Everything overwhelmed, as Alice stumbled to find the nearest haven of sanctuary within a sea shell.

Its smoothly curved pearly walls were easy on the eye, except in those places where they caught a glint of sun. That hurt. The surface felt good on her cheek, but the best and worst thing about the shell was the music you could only hear from the inside...

I know you've probably held a shell to your ear, but this is very very different. A secret that shells have kept very well is that they only let you hear what they want you to, and that corresponds roughly to what they think you expect to hear. A roaring whoosh and most people will wander off, none the wiser.

But each shell distills the vibration of the waves to a fine and delicate series of melodies that never escape. Each shell tunes the vagaries of the wind to secret arpeggios that might have been the undoing of Paganini and each shell blends the harmonies of the shifting sands outside to something rare and exquisite.

Before Alice, no human had ever been an audience to the overpowering symphony of the sea.

Madness conducted the little spikes of intensity that rose and fell, drilling against the inside of her skull during the first movement.

There was no interval, no break, but the shifting carried her to a scary sort of sane that gnawed and grinded relentlessly against its confining prison of bone.

Then, it broke barriers and spilled....

Her mouth was open and her throat vibrated with a high-pitched fluting whistle. Was she still listening to the music or had she become it?

Sensing a new element, an enhancement to its features, the shell had worked the dimensions of Alice into its music, bouncing new improvisations off her form. That was the way of the shell. It employed everything within its environment in the greater quest for audial excellence.

The girl thought tone was god and tried to move towards it. Then she decided that tone was the devil and tried to move away from it. Because the music surrounded her, the results were exactly the same.

She crawled towards what felt like the heart of the sound, its crescendo whorling around and around, in colors she could almost see.

The music changed, becoming cold and wet. The vibration of tone lingered in echoes, but it was passing. She had found the mouth of the shell, but outside, she still felt as if she had no skin, no hair and no face, even. She was nothing more than a pulse that continued to go ah-ah-ah-ah-ah, without end. She could not even tell whether she still crawled or had stopped. She might have hugged herself, had she been able to locate any of her limbs.

She had no awareness of time passing, but after a while, she realized that the music had shifted from being an event to becoming a memory. She felt her fingers curled around her toes and slowly the rest of her body came back online.

She opened her eyes. She had to brush rags of hair the color of sleek seaweed from her eyes. Her skin was tinged green, hands and feet webbed. The girl called Alice swallowed hard, but then she remembered that she had wanted to be different.

Something grubby and white stuck to her palms. She stared at it for a long time before realizing that it was the remains of the pill to make you tall. Painstakingly, she licked her hands until they were clean. Then she got up and walked into the wild and the deep.

(t.y.m.... thank you to my inner muse and guide for coming through for me, once again)

A tale from the Taiga...

First, a bit of personal history... When I was in my late teens, very early twenties, this was my going-out song....



Know what I mean by a going-out song? If that's it, the world is about to go KA-BOOM and you've got time to listen to just one more song.... this was mine.... a heartbreakingly sad tale about betrayal on grand grand scale... the song is about a group of Russian soldiers returning home victorious to a horrible, horrible 'reward....
To quote from the last verses (lyrics by Mike Scott of the Waterboys)

But I never got to kiev
We never came by home
Train went north to the taiga
We were stripped and marched in file
Up the great siberian road
For miles and miles and miles and miles
Dressed in stripes and tatters
In a gulag left to die
All because comrade stalin was scared that
Wed become too westernized!

Used to love my country
Used to be so young
Used to believe that life was
The best song ever sung
I would have died for my country
In 1945
But now only one thing remains
But now only one thing remains
But now only one thing remains
But now only one thing remains
The brute will to survive!

I am posting this today, because the song has an odd echo in a piece added to the Smithsonion's website yesterday.... a tale of survival from the Taiga...

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/For-40-Years-This-Russian-Family-Was-Cut-Off-From-Human-Contact-Unaware-of-World-War-II-188843001.html


Please visit the link and read the absolutely awe-inspiring tale of what it's like, not to die, but to live in the Taiga... as the Lykov family did for more than forty years...

Everything - Part 2

You left a trail of crumbs. Birds ate it, but I saw a path in the formation in which they took to the skies. Thank you, I will find my way now...

... I doubt if I will be able to tell you everything, but what little I do tell you might feel like everything, if you read it in the right way... Will that make it enough?

There are infinitely more answers locked up in the puzzle that is the average human soul, than there is in the world... but sometimes you have to go somewhere or do something in the world, to be able to juggle the secret codes of the soul in the right combination...

... Maybe that is why we tell each other stories and sing each other songs... in the hope that their echoes and their reflections might lead us to the sudden recognition of clues...

If there is a treasure, it is nearly always in your own backyard... By all means, buy a map, but do not forget that you will most likely do most of your digging back home...

And remember this... gold seldom looks like gold when it is first brought to the surface... it is refined by what you do with it....

(I called this blog post 'Everything Part 2' because I feel sure that I may have written one called 'Everything' already... but I cannot remember what was in it... If you are unable to find the first 'Everything', I may have written it in a parallel universe... but perhaps... even so... someday, you might remember having read it and I might remember having written it... keep listening.... as Violet Baudelaire says in Lemony Snicket, 'There is always something'...)

The Gold Standard

Pink Floyd. 1971. Live in Pompeii. In my opinion, this band, at this stage of their career, is about as close as you will get to a 'gold standard' of progressive rock music. In any of their filmed live performances of the period, their absorption in what they do is absolute and one hundred percent. There are no attempts to connect with the audience. In fact, for 'Live in Pompeii', there is no audience (except for a few village kids, who allegedly hid out of sight). The band became their music. In one performance, you would see Dave Gilmour stepping up to Roger Waters mid-performance to re-tune his bass guitar. In another, Roger Waters adjusts his phrasing to cover the instance of Nick Mason dropping a drumstick. Everything they do is a playful exploration of shaping sound. Elements such as shredding speed or vocal range do not even come up. Those are cheap tricks for lesser bands to employ. If the music calls for a specific note at a specific time, one of the band members will find some way of bringing it in - and it hardly matters which one of them it is, or how he did it...



There's a couple of things that's been on my mind for the past few months with regards to creative expression:

- reading up (for a writing assignment) about the Renaissance, a time when some of the world's most amazing constructions sometimes took generations to complete.
- listening to Neil Gaiman comparing the early part of his career to 'sending out messages in bottles and hoping some of them would come back'
- my own withdrawal from participation in a certain popular social network - for reasons I won't go into right now.

And again and again, it seems to bring me back to thoughts about audiences and the creative process...

A good creative artist becomes the work and disappears into it. Speaking about my own craft now, telling a good story is less about using clever words and sentences and more about making the walls of the existing world vanish. The best writer is the one who becomes invisible within the first three sentences of the story. That would be my personal 'gold standard' and to me, the only way to achieve this, is to forget that there is an audience.