Instantaneous Spontaneity

The ward psychoanalyzes people with problems to no avail. Their mental state necessitates a helping hand, not a mechanism of extrication. But beyond the obvious tragedy of helpless cases lies the fundamental issue of alienation. Men detached from everything tend to settle for nothing.

Looking through vertical blinds, a man dressed in white contemplates the sunlight shining in his eyes. Waiting for a knock on his door, he’ll likely lose his sight. The act of contemplation is infinite in the mind of the constricted. Out of necessity he eats the food that’s slid under his door atop a plastic tray. Every day he urinates and defecates inside a hole in the corner of his room; a hole of seemingly infinite depth, since no perceptible smell comes from it. Unaware of his surroundings, he often walks into walls, never to fully understand the humor of the situation.

Laughter echoes in his mind before he sleeps; another one of his necessities.
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To begin a task is a rewarding task in itself. Think of a fisherman. There is art in his trade. Art is the means to his end. Last week a middle-aged an sailed on a boat to the Black Sea. He fashioned a top-of-the-line harpoon gun strapped to his back, along with various baits and lures attached by Velcro straps sewn onto his wet suit. Everything was home-made. Nothing could stop him from dying that day.

Standing on his creaky rowboat he scoped out the horizon for the sun with a pair of makeshift binoculars. Everything about him screamed of triumph. The sea ahead him settled into golden ripples under the setting sun. He bathed under the two-tone blue red sky with a discerning look on his face. Awaiting total darkness, he closed his eyes, dreaming himself into the future.

Doing this was a simple but uncommon mistake. When he awoke he lay dead inside his mother's womb. Everything about her screamed of pain. Once he died he heard the rain and awoke again. A tempest swept over his vessel. Alone he rowed against the rising waves and puring rain. He thought of his mother's hollow cheeks and fading pale blue eyes. Tonight he would catch the largest fish in the sea...

Silence swept over the coastline as the fisherman staggered through the shore and into the trees. He held the catch in his arms. Eventually he gained complete balance and stood still. His nostrils flared once, then twice. He looked down a beaten path to his left and attempted to dart forward, again beginning to stager. Almost falling forward, he dropped the catch on the muddy ground. He began to panic. His face started turning red and his eyes began to swell. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he bit his fingernails.

Suddenly, he tears off his clothes and runs naked to a cave. As he approaches the cave's entrance he again begins to lose his nerves. He slowly steps into the cave and bleeds into the darkness. From inside one can see the moonlight penetrate the air, exposing the eyes of nocturnal creatures in the foliage surrounding the cave's entrance.

Amidst the subtle chatter of creatures, the fisherman walks towards his sleeping mother and looms over her heaving body. On the verge of tears he slides himself under one of her arms. He felt his mother's coarse skin graze against his. He instantly felt at place. He knew that she would soon be fed.

He dreamed of an epic bare-fist battle against a Black bear that night. He awoke when he felt his mother run her quartz-like fingers from the ground to his chest. She drew him in closer. A smile came over his face, he had successfully accomplished a task for the first time in his life.

But as he rose to meet his mother's eyes, a set of claws ripped through his abdomen.
__

The Prince was the shortcoming of the dance.
“Look at these idiots prance” he said,
as they danced around a ballroom bathed in blackness.
He let out a drawn out sigh.
The lights went off.

A silent assassin raises an axe and slices the clothing on every woman’s spine from top to bottom.

The lights slowly simmer into brightness as seamlessly as they dimmed.
“Fools!” he shouted, as he opened his eyes from a blink.
“Night is day” he muttered, as they closed again.

He shakes his head, his angst in vain; struggling against uproarious laughter.
He rises from his throne with sarcastic over-enthusiasm and vigorously walks to the center of the ballroom, unnoticed by an inebriated audience.

He is the sole actor in this play.

Everybody felt time slow down
as they watched him stride
to the center of the stage
in glee. Ecstasy.

“I’ll break all your knees!” he screamed, “I’ll rip your hearts to shreds with my eyes!”
A lunatic. A simple lunatic being laughed at like the child he is,
laughed at by a society of colleagues, friends, shadows and facades.

He struggles to move between,
hindered by the jostle and tumble of ethyl-breathing animals.
Powerless to make his subjects listen to the music of his voices,
his pride stumbles through mere air.
He is merely an heir.
__

Someone was telling a story when Simon opened the door to his apartment. He ignored the smell of alcohol. Walking resolutely past the living room, he set his keys and wallet on the kitchen counter. Past the kitchen awaited a hallway with three identical doors. He looked intently at the farthest doorknob, studying the distorted image of a man and a woman sitting on a sofa. Having set his suitcase on the ground, he began to contemplate whether or not he should turn around. Finally he smiled, aware of his foolishness. He kicked off his shoes and ran towards Josh and Emily. They greeted him with laughter.

That night, ethyl words poured out their mouths. Their pasts had long been intertwined. Long before the world had changed for the worse there was a time of innocence and simplicity.

Beams of sunlight fell between the leaves of the canopy. They settled on wet skin. Columns of humid air glowed white, drenched in midday sunlight. They danced as branches swayed in the wind. I stood mesmerized.

South of the sugar plantation there was once a citrus farm where mostly lime trees grew. Cercropias, typical of the region, formed a thick perimeter around the clearance. The wind began to pick up, but I took my time. I had left my boots next to a stream which ran parallel to a wire fence delineating ownership, searching for answers. I had a destination, but each step was perfection.

The rich, black soil was pregnant with purity. The local farmers planted staple crops for subsistence. Many also worked in the plantation, though few were trained to operate the industrial machinery. Most were hired to chop sugar cane in the fields, but in their spare time they would plant yucas and potatoes in the forest. Never physically present in the plantation, the patrons were unaware of this clandestine cultivation, and so could not enforce injustice.

I knelt, tore a yuca root from the earth and snapped it in half, merely to smell it. Its chalk white flesh boiled and seeped into my nostrils. At once, my stomach rumbled. I straightened out my neck and sought to orient myself. I noticed birds taking shelter in their nests. A storm was gathering. I set my hands free and continued to walk.

By now the sun was setting and I knew my parents were looking for me. I heard my name in the distance.

“Simon! Simon!” yelled a familiar face across a crowd of anonymous faces. “Simon!”
Simon was watching his feet as he headed home from class and did not notice. Suddenly a rock the size of a grape socked him in the temple. He instinctively covered his head with both hands and began to laugh hysterically, letting out a tear.

“Are those tears of joy, my boy?” A man twice his age presented himself guffawing, with open arms. They embraced each other firmly, though they had just seen each other fifteen minutes ago.

“They must be” he said, rubbing his temple with two fingers, head tilted down, but eyes looking up.

“They must be, indeed. Look.” He opened his suitcase and let a gust of wind take all its contents with it. “The data is useless. Decades of rigorous verification have finally shown that the sensitivity of our telescopes is insufficient to compensate for the statistical error of each data value. I see no reason to continue searching for answers, my friend.”

“So you’re saying” he paused, in total shock “that this has all been for nothing?”

“Well, not for nothing. We can finally say with certainty that it is impossible to attain any reliable astrological information from objects with redshift higher than 6 and farther than 28 billion light-years from our galaxy.”

Simon stared at his mentor in disbelief.

“All the calculations are here” said Dr. Finn, with a smirk. Simon eyeballed the papers littering the vast expanse of grass to his right, some still in flight. He stared at his mentor for a few seconds. He was still holding the open suitcase in his hands. Simon felt beckoned to dive inside it. Dr. Finn shut it and threw it behind him, bursting into tears.

They both sat on the pavement. Simon stared to his left with arms tied around his knees, cheek digging into one, temple into the other. His head was throbbing. He noticed the sun was setting. White cumulus clouds seemed to sail on the wind. Pink tufts scattered near the horizon, rimmed in gold. Suddenly a silhouette appeared in his sight.

“Simon!” yelled Eva “Are you deaf?! I’ve been yelling your name for the past—” she dwelled on the hyperbole “millennium, and you refuse” (drawing out the ‘u’) “to pay me any attention! Didn’t your mother teach you manners, young man?”

“Please, now’s not the time”

“No! You need to get in shape, mister! You’re just going to sit here with some stranger and watch your Tai-Chi group do work?” Her smile could fill a room with light. She knelt and removed her glasses, peering directly into Simon’s eyes. He was lost.

“I’m sorry Eva; I just received some bad news.” He straightened his back putting both palms on the ground, and looked back at her. “I was just on my way home to pick up some loose clothes, but I don’t think I can go anymore. A pile of life’s work just fell in front of me.” He got up slowly, noticing Dr. Finn had already left, though the suitcase remained.

“So who were you sitting with just now?”
“Professor Finn. Look, I really gotta go, I’ll try to be here on time tomorrow.”
“Fine.”
She smiled and reached in to give him a kiss on the cheek.
“Just try to relax, okay?”

Simon spent the rest of the night wondering why the sky is blue during the day.

The night smelled of fire and smoke, but mostly alcohol. He was sober, locked in his room, looking to rekindle his passion for literature. Validation is a rare and precious substance.

Excellence is less abundant; dozens of balled up papers littered across his floor as testament. He was working on a new one at the moment:

From the clammy hole between the crusty crevices where lower and upper lip meet came a dry, drawn out groan.
“Die...”
An alarm clock is silenced by a fist. A shame his cry of angst will never reach the ears of his boss, smothered by a pillow drenched in drool as he sweeps his face across it. He darts instinctively into a sitting position on the edge of his bed, slides open his drawer and reaches for his cell phone. 3:54 P.M. He remains still; it’s a statement to the world, the weight of his thoughts a stone, his body a hill.
A round stone contemplates, blades of grass tacitly crackling under its weight; it stirs from its solemn state, ceasing its moment of mourning after having dwelled upon the imminence of its descent, its conversion from potential to kinetic, from triumph to struggle. A moment ends and another begins; Sisyphus stares at a stone rolling downhill. He is ready. A grown man sits at the edge of his bed, head between his knees, shattered alarm clock in both hands.
“Time to leave, Cyrus.” A note to himself. He could’ve never existed between 3:54 and 4:35 P.M, with no memory of his commute to work.
He stares at a note his boss wrote to him. He keeps it on his door as a flaunt. A name tag. White on black lettering. The kind you slide in from the side into a clear plastic groove. The kind you read and reread as you contemplate your insignificance while distant echoes of footsteps and coughs hone in on your senses. Paranoid synesthesia. Nonetheless he presses down on his father’s name and with his right thumb flexed and digits outstretched, a sudden flick of the wrist plus a fraction of a second produces the clap of plastic landing flat on a tile. He steps on the name tag and kicks towards the hallway where the footsteps’ echoes curiously fade into silence. Plastic skids on tile with a hiss until it hits the baseboard with a pop. At the end of the hall is his father in polished black leather shoes. He stares down at his name tag for a moment, looks up, and gives his son a tired glance. Sick and tired. He walks towards his office, right hand balled in his pocket, eyes locked with his son’s, straight-faced. Four steps away from his son he reveals what could’ve been a punch in the face: an identical name tag. He takes four steps.
“Child, don’t embarrass me again”
He slides the name tag into place.
“Now go pick the other one up. It’s a task you can easily accomplish, I think; a reason not to fire you.”
“You wouldn’t fire me even if I sabotaged your blueprints, causing the death of thousands upon the building’s tragic collapse, which curiously enough, would mimic the subsequent collapse of your contracting firm, and along with that, the end of everyone’s respect for you.”

His father, already sitting in his plush leather chair, staring smugly at his son with left index on his chin, raises an eyebrow and with a swagger of the head says:
“You’re out of the house, Cyrus. Now get to work.”
A flaunt, a gust of wind. Blades of grass crackle.

“Is there a word for a state of being in which any sensation produces a feeling of paranoia?! Is there?! Of course there isn’t!” It was three o’clock in the morning and Simon was still talking to himself, now infuriated at his audience-to-be.

“Paranoid synesthesia. All of Cyrus’s sensory cues led to paranoid synesthesia—this needs to be said because the reader does not receive all of these cues in the writing—they exist exclusively in the mind of the character. The fact that he ignores this sensation and flicks his father’s name tag off its rightful place for no apparent reason characterizes Cyrus as defiant. He is acting in defiance. But why is he paranoid? He is expecting reprimand, consequence, an end to the cause of his defiance. Defiance is his validation.”

He put his pencil down and let out a sigh.

“Synesthetic paranoia...that seems to make more sense.”

He continued to labor at his desk under the cold, white light of his fluorescent lamp. Water vapor steamed from a ceramic teacup adorned with Isaac Newton’s face and a quote in blue: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

“Defiance is unnecessary.”

Suddenly and angrily, Simon balled up his writing and threw it behind him. He let out another sigh. He turned on his computer screen, but quickly turned it off, shaking his head. The image of his desktop background swam in his eyelids. Five of his high school friends waving at the camera, smiling. He thought of something and began to write feverishly:

I trace my intentions across the only book of memories I own, only to find a mirror.
This is the beginning of a story with no end foreseen.

We had settled back in the city. It reeked of tear gas. Revolution was always ripe, which I never understood. The smell of lime was something I missed.

I was lying on a made bed next to a whirring fan. I enounced vowels through the blades out of boredom, expecting a response. I could smell yucca boiling in the kitchen downstairs.

We were staying at a friend’s house—the owner of the plantation we had visited earlier that day. It was three stories high, the tallest building in the neighbourhood. Its external façade was gray. Cemented stones receded to two large mahogany doors with brass handles. The ramp leading up to the door was wide and smudged with black tire marks. Every Monday, four workers would unload a truck bed full of bags of brown sugar into the house. Half of the second floor was dedicated to storage. The other half included a kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms and three bathrooms.

I was pacing on the courtyard of the third floor, a refurbished rooftop, waiting for the maid to call out my name. I stopped pacing and my eyes dwelled on a large, commemorative flag celebrating two hundred years of independence. It was an American flag hung behind a dusty pool table on the wall of the bedroom opposite to mine.

I had always dreamed of going to America, having heard stories of all the awesome places one could visit. Disney World always came to mind, but only as an amalgam of fictional settings and characters derived from memories of images of movies my grandfather sent me in the mail.

The sun was on the verge of setting. I could feel it in the sky. Dark clouds drifting westward settled above me and began to precipitate a light drizzle, enough to get me downstairs. A gust of chilly wind followed me down after I shut the door behind me. I noticed a treadmill, ran downstairs and jumped on it, frantically pushing all the buttons on its console.
__

A few hundred people lived in a small community lodged in a cave network in one of the most treacherous mountain ranges in the universe. Visitors from other galaxies were obviously capable of finding them, but never did. In fact, they didn't even attempt becoming visitors at all! The people of the aforementioned community, the self proclaimed Thieves, understand they are blessed by the calmness of their potential conquerors, and use that as a justification for their morally reprehensible acts.This is why they were eventually obliterated by the end of the universe. In the next universe, their analogues emerged as conquerors of their native planet.
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I do because I love you. Throughout my life there will be those who doubt my true intentions. Similarly, there will be those who misrepresent them. Nonetheless, without an ounce of regret I will declare that in life only two things will remain constant: the arrow of time and the heart of humanity.

The arrow of time points in one direction. Currently, human attempts at debunking this fact are futile. Scientists will rigorously attempt to further elucidate the true nature of time, which presently must be thought of as the dimension through which space moves. But as we, beings of matter moving in space, traverse through time, our knowledge of this dimension cannot increase without the persistent resonance of our beating hearts ringing in our ears.

Our struggle is defined by our pulse. When wartime arrives, our friends will gallop to the gallows and emerge as friends nonetheless, though headless. Their minds have vanished now their heads are speechless, but memory is fallible only when we are restless. Let us not forget their voices.

With every word, breath and pulse your heart desired only love. My desire then was knowledge of self.
Was it you or I who parted when our intentions met? Or was it life that led us both into conflict?
Was it you or I who spoke of glee when the other of regret? Or was it strife that held us both in peace?

Years later and both in pieces, how can we exist? I subscribe to you conclusions based on love alone, because if else, my youth will only show convolutions etched on paper by machines which further emphasize the truth of our futility as men and women of time, so small in scale.

The heart of humanity beats as one, but not at once. Our enemies prevail in times when enemies exist.
When from the heart we fashion time as slave and sling it from a bow, why not instead with a bow show time respect as the master of our hearts? Because our enemies exist as we do to them. But as we, cyclical beings, begin to understand the true nature of conquest, our quest to understand becomes a con.
It is I, hypocrisy, who loves the meaning of our suicide.

Our death is the struggle of beginning and ending. From start we stood naked before nature. Communities of apes, at least somewhat intelligent began to understand to speak. What grunts and screeches must have rang in such confusion! What primal blood these hearts must pump to wreak such havoc sound! Knowledge of right and wrong, in this image, only for the strong as the weak accept a future as bleak as daylight.

Sunrise! I scream, Sunrise!

From this moment on, let it be known that the power of language is infinite. The order of language is a stream. When time allows let there be no space between you and I. Love, confined to mere words in the framework of our minds, I shatter you with hatred. Judges, beings of eternal knowledge, exit as I exist as one with infinity in the chaos of homogeneity. What is trivial is quickly understood, like human language, powerless to stop its self propelled gait to apocalypse. These words, so vivid, will blur into darkness when our humble universe annihilates our arrogance upon contact. Darkness, void devoid of light, I see you in my dreams beating like a heart. Where are the rest of you? Where is the rest of humanity as my alienation clings onto a drama? How long will it be until my will is displaced by anger? How many pages will our pulse allow to turn? How often does our beating heart regret a beat?
It is I who see this beating heart and dread my sight at night, for sleep is always drowned by the sound of our love while I, in despair, arise as a tomb.
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Human history is struggle. Since time began our ultimate fate was ordained. Aften billions of years we appeared as humble men, but now we exist as dominators of the universe, forgetting the universe is self defined. Though Man rules the universe, man is still man. Man can never become the universe itself. This is the rhetoric of militant rebel groups scattered throughout the universe. Since everyone in the universe can be at any place at any time, it is very easy for them to hide. Conversely, they can easily be found. However, for some obscure reason they always escape the grasp of Human Will at the last instant. Always and forever, it seems, for we have not yet achieved peace. Once the rebels are eradicated and the universe is dominated, peace will be achieved as predicted. The rebel men are against prediction. They follow a doctrine of spiritual freedom and eternal wisdom. This obviously cannot coexist with the present dominant system and so must be eradicated.
Personally, I grew tired of the turmoil and escaped to the past. From here I write to you, sipping on coconut water on a hammock between two palms in South beach, suddenly in the French Riviera. I love this feeling. The power to revisit the past as a museum of experience gives humans the ability to learn eternally. I do not care if the universe collapses in on itself as long as I die in peace, here alone in the silence of the world before we walked on it. But loneliness, I see why you exist. Without you there is no possibility of unity. Unity cannot come into being without struggle. In the past I can create my own mantra, and not obsess over what, fundamentally, is an opinion. From the set of all opinions, mine takes priority over all. This allows me to believe I am free.
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The most important factor in any productive venture is comfort. Situated in a set of circumstances most conducive to productivity, one does not only feel productive, but also happy. Happiness is the most important compensation for anyone's effort, which is often a consequence of unconditional love. This phenomenon has been tested for integrity time after time, increasingly showing signs of instability. The history of human experience is testament to the existence of this dreaded trend.

It begins one day on the corner of a street. He had met her for the first time and not knowing how to say goodbye to her, didn't say goodbye at all, but she only found his anxiety flattering, further exacerbating the ailment. They had met previously in a bowling alley, but truly they had first communicated months ago through private messages. Had anyone observed his behavior, they would have immediately noticed the disparity between his alleged beliefs and outward appearance. This, due to lack of experience, impaired his ability to make good decisions.

As time passed, a series of bad decisions caused by bad measurements led to their inexplicable separation. At times it was necessary to lie, or in her case, cry when explaining why their love had lost.
Her best friends warned her of his selfishness, but she selflessly defended his selflessness, assured of their mutual conviction. Love lost can always be regained. He could never stop himself from seeking out her words. If they went unheard he would imagine hearing her voice verbalizing his worst fears.

Years passed and it became clear that his words change with his fears, so he left the world he knew to find a place of peace. His journey began the day after he decided he would die alone. Facing the road ahead of him, he thought of traveling by sea. Tuning his senses to the ocean breeze he found his way to the bay and played a game of chess with a man named Coach before he sneaked onto a boat headed out to sea. Life throbbing in his chest, he saw the light of day sink to the ocean floor with a scintillating display of light rays leaving blue sky speckled black into the night. Day again, he arose from the starboard side from the comfort of wooden planks to a ring of faces confused by his presence. Calmly, he parted the crowd and walked somewhere intently.

It became clear that his fate was one of determined angst and predestined struggle. She, on the other hand, knew of ways to sail without setting a single foot on a boat. Like many others in this world she quickly learned her place and learned of happiness, responsibility and hierarchy. These things she could not share with him disappeared from her knowledge at the the thought of him.

Why should the mere ideation of a person affect someone's actions? These kinds of memories are often the cause of bad decisions and should be eradicated from human thought.
I have experimentally confirmed the existence of a method by which this feat can be accomplished. First, one must pretend to leave everyone forever. Over time, one will learn of their intrinsic ethereal necessities, finally to crawl back home as a stray cat too proud to be fed, but too hungry for pride. In the end, too proud for hunger is the case for those who persevere in the artful science of good decision making.

He sat on a rocking chair stroking his beard next to a fire as he told his grandchildren the story of a crazy young man who killed and impersonated a captain for two months before abandoning ship naked,
swimming seven miles to a Greek island, almost dying. His newborn grandchildren could not understand a single word, but nevertheless expressed appreciation for his warm and attentive voice with sporadic coos and raspberries. It was not until they sat chained behind bars that they simultaneously recognized the significance of Coach and the bet.

Doyle drew a nail and a rock out of each pocket and started chiseling away at the wall.
“Counting days, they say” said one of the guards, “but I'm onto them”. He continued chewing his sandwich as he stared unfocused at the brother's cell gate, contemplating an inevitable raise and indulging in a slippery slope of triumphant events, somehow causally connected in his mind. Suddenly he phases back into the present moment when he is asked for his badge.

Doyle and Darwin witnessed this in disbelief, taking it as a sign of things to be done.
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There is the story of a young man that went by the name of Storch. In his day, he rivaled all who opposed the length of his mustache, considering it obscene. It was not a very challenging battle, that. Storch managed to obliterate his enemies with a single massive sneeze, expelling extremely small food particles at high velocity. To his surprise, his enemies opened their mouths in awe, and ate. Suddenly Storch realized exactly how tall he was, towering over faces parallel to the sky.
When he became a man, Storch got a hot head. So close to the stars, he wondered from afar: “Will I ever see a face again?” A poet of sorts, he gazed from the center of our galaxy at the rest of the universe, occasionally looking in the opposite direction for something to amuse. Himself and others or nothing, he thought in a dream. But did this man grow in spite of his troubles!(?)
Long before he knew of his own death, Storch died. Past this event's horizon he went, undisturbed by his exponentially increasing length as he stretched into infinite density. His former enemies began to use him as a ladder. They had discovered that the food stuck to Storch's mustache had miraculous medical powers. They came across this discovery after noticing that their eldermost member, Rassler, hadn't died after one hundred and seventy three years of life! They sought out to reap the benefits, knowing they were small enough to climb up Storch unnoticed.
Rassler believed that Storch's mustache was coated with an adhesive lining containing the substance of immortality. He, of course, phrased this much differently when convincing his peers to climb. In an image reminiscent of dramatizations of slaves toiling away at the construction of the Great Pyramids, one could see an exuberant Rassler yelling commands at his peers. These, of course, were not the kinds of commands a master would yell at a slave, they were constructed with a wisdom unknown to man at the time.
So blind men, deaf to wisdom, decided to torture poor Rassler for the rest of his life. Yet these people continued his work. After a few weeks of labor, a sound amplification monument was erected on Rassler's mouth; his brutally shrill shrieks of pain motivated the workforce like no other stimulus could.
It is only fitting to let the reader decide the ultimate fate of Rassler's slaves, whom upon reaching Storch's moustache, could not find a single crumb.
__

Monday, January 18, 2010

Testament

Friday, July 31, 2009

Moving out

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Instance

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

...

Thursday, June 18, 2009

from conversation

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

and finally, a multitude of incomplete stories

before we were gods...a large fraction of my love goes out

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