The Child on the Tracks

Anyone who places him or herself within harm's way, will eventually have to deal with the approach of harm... Imagine a child playing on the railroad tracks and there is a train approaching... Let us make this the happiest of possible outcomes. The train driver spots the child, pulls the brakes and the train stops in time. The child continues to play. She has just learnt that in her world, she is more powerful than the train. It's a heady feeling. I can stop trains. Trains stop for me. I am the champion of the world. But, the tracks still belong to the train, and not the child. The train carries passengers and freight. It has a time table and a destination. Eventually, the child will have to move, so that the train can resume its journey and its purpose. Until she does, worlds, futures, realities are placed on hold...

Duality or insanity?

(this is a conversation that happens inside my head) She said, "Why do I imagine that I am two persons?" He countered, "Why do you imagine that you have two hands? Because they are more useful than having just one..." (maybe i should stop wasting energy on trying to act sane)

Review: The Tale of One Bad Rat by Bryan Talbot

Dreams and ideals are as important as what happens to us. In fact, they are more important. What happens to us, batters us against some breakwater over and over, until we bleed. We go Whew, I hope that never happens again. Once was enough. But dreams are the eternal companions of our soul, the wise guides we trust with an instinct that goes beyond this world, spanning across the multi-dimensional truth of who and what we really are.

In The Tale of One Bad Rat by Bryan Talbot, Helen is cast adrift by the toxically dysfunctional aspects of her family, long before she runs away to become the girl behind the 'Homeless, please help' placard. The only thread that guides her through a maze of hidden scars and secret pain, is a fantasy and a dream. In the struggle against incest and child abuse, the monsters stay invisible. Therefore, the soul's champion too must come from a source that hides beyond the physical world. And so Helen follows the signs and prompts from the imaginary world like a trail of bread crumbs, each one providing a moment's nourishment to keep her going until she reaches the home of her soul.

This is probably why the world needs stories like this and many more. Stories cast out a lifeline when no one in the 'real world' wants to get their feet wet to save someone who is drowning. The world says No, that child is fine (I've once read somewhere that No, I'm fine is probably the most common lie in the world) or She is just acting out. So often an unspoken truce is formed with the abuser, where the victim actually feels bad about each honest thought he or she has. As if somehow embarrassing the abuser would be a worse crime than what was already done to him or her.

To quote from the afterword of the book: The utter selfishness of the abuser is the common denominator - not class, race or creed. The psychological aftereffects - despair and withdrawal; low self-esteem; feeling worthless, dirty and bad - can last for life. The children take the badness onto themselves.

The Field ("stories" or "infinity")

Last week, when my sister was out of town, I was looking after her two cats for a few days. Because it was rainy, I took a taxi there (I don't have a driver's licence or car - another story of my failings but I'm not telling that now). On day two, as I got out the money to pay the driver, there was a tiny slip of paper in between. What was on the slip of paper was the following quote by William Blake:

“Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

So, being me (i.e. a little weird) I gave the taxi driver the piece of paper with the quote along with his money.

On the way back the sun was out, so I decided to walk. My sister stays just on the edge of that large empty piece of field that still contains a few of the remnants of streets and foundations that had been District Six in the 1960s. It's empty now. Drug dealers and copper wires thieves hide their wares there. At one time there were a few shacks, but the truth is, the authorities had forgotten who (which department or whatever) owned this piece of field so it just lay there...

As I walked this length, my inner muse said Go on, throw it. I knew instantly what he referred to. In my bag, I've got an old A4 sized diary in which I write my story ideas.

Every page, till the middle of March was filled, some with several different ideas on the same page... my creative wealth, it seems (although, to be honest, I've accepted that at least half of it will probably never get written)... now my mischievous muse was challenging me to throw it into the field, for the pages to scatter and be lost... I felt a mix of panic and longing... because part of me did see the attraction of clearing the slate, starting again... being empty... Then he said, I couldn't do it either. But he didn't need to say it for me to know one day, I will toss the book... when my bones no longer has the capacity to house my soul and my spirit would rise and the pages would scatter like seagulls... off to seek other horizons..

Later that day, my muse said... I could have given you twenty new stories if you did throw the book... now I can only give you ten...

And today... I was drifting into a dream, an imagining, surprised by what I 'saw' with other eyes and going cool I wanna put that into a story. I yanked myself back to the here and now to write it down.. and part of me realized that, my 'being a writer' was sometimes a little counter productive to the other needs of my soul. This impulse to go hey, that would make a good story sometimes slashed like a whip through my stream of consciousness, halting it...disturbing it... where perhaps it should not have halted...

Being a writer is wonderful, but am i really putting my imagination to the best use, by just mining it for ideas? By snatching the very first flowers along the path home and going heh-heh, got them, when perhaps instead I should be travelling further along those paths... perhaps this compulsion to take 'field notes' of every momentary dream is really an interrupt. Infinity is out there. I don't need to stuff it all in a chest until it loses its shine... it will be there till the end of me...

winter song...

The familiar embers of the old
burns low
And fierce winds of change
howl and blow
The villains of the future
and the past
I fear they have me
cornered at last...

I tried to reach
for tomorrow
But my fingers slipped
on yesterday's sorrow
And every half made dream
turned to fail
My truth remains
on the other side of the veil... ?

(and i play its melody on my keyboard.... sometimes i sing it myself... sometimes i listen deep into the darkness of hidden dimensions for other voices to take over... t.y.m... i have become a bridge that reaches into other realities, but that has placed me ever closer to the borderlands of this one)

A conversation with the past

Here's a tip to twelve year olds. A cool project to make your own time capsule. Sometime this year, sit down and do what Jeremiah McDonald did 20 years ago. Take a few minutes and record one half of a conversation with your older self. Save it, but don't look at it again, or better yet, give it to a family member to keep for you. Very important DO NOT WATCH UNTIL TWENTY YEARS LATER.. (no cheating)

I had a dream in which...

.... I found myself in a Victorian study, with dark wooden panelling and book shelves with leather bound volumes and two men were discussing my skull and it was 200 years after I died...

This one had been at least fifteen years ago, and technically speaking, it was a hypnogogic vision - you know, one of those very vivid dreams that occur before you are fully asleep.

When I was much younger I had a series of 'Alien invasion' type dreams, in which I'd find myself threatened by this little aliens ('Grays'), but the real freaky thing about those were, I knew, inside the dream that it was a dream and always managed to escape by willfully waking myself up out of it. Then, a fresh twist came. One night, I dreamt I was practicing to fly. That must have been hands down the most enjoyable dream I've ever had. Swooping and diving and whirling through the air without a single thing to hold me back. The thing is, some time after the flying dream, I had another of the 'Alien invasion' type dreams, but instead of waking myself up, I reasoned, wait, you know how to fly now, you can just fly away. And I did.

A Chinese poet called Zhuang Zi wrote, "Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. "

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zhuangzi

So, what DO we know about our dreams and about our waking... ?

This morning, first thing, my inner muse said... try this, tell something from your life, something that makes you feel sad and worthless, as if it was a only a dream from which you've woken up, so I did... and some things hurt a little less when you do this, and some things even make you smile...

I had a dream in which.... I lived in a place I hated and all I wanted was to leave and never never come back, but the more I wanted it, the more things went wrong and I could never come close to getting the money for a plane ticket... you know those dreams where you are in a supermarket and you know you don't have any money, but you can't leave and you can't stop piling things into your trolley.... well, it was exactly the same, except on a larger scale... (a snapshot from my twenties)

I had a dream in which... I had a million notebooks full of stories, and I was always telling myself start one, start one.... but whenever I tried to grasp one, it would shatter into a million pieces, that just became new story ideas....

The dreams themselves can explore fears, repressed emotions or even alternate perceptions...

I had a dream in which.... God gave me this cool body change, but then my Mommy didn't know me anymore...

I had a dream in which... I created this brilliant music, but when I woke I could remember only tiny bits of it... just receding snatches, nothing I was able to write down...

I had a dream in which... someone came to me and woke me up...