Space.

Space. Changes everything.

We discuss largely about Time. Give it the importance it deserves. Knowing that it slips away as we breathe. But what we forget to talk about, is Space; to ponder upon its importance. To give it its rightful pedestal that it begs for. We tend to take it for granted to an extent that seldom do we even consider it.

The only time we realize its gigantic value and the impact it had on us is when we find ourselves in a deep Vacuum. A vacuum so intense and void that no other space could ever refill it. A dry vacuum that was moments ago moist with memories that were created through this Space, from the fragments of Lives that were birthed from this Space. A Space that changed the course of our Lives, that inspired us, that brought out the best of us. A Space that made us feel emotions that no other Space, however sophisticated or fancy may it be, could even come close to replicating.

Time plants the gems, but Space nourishes them; polishes them; situates them-Space gives them a significance. A significance that is in direct relation to the Space, and to only THAT space. Nothing could change it, nothing could replace it.

Now here we are. With everything seemingly in the place it should be. Nothing seems to have changed, except the Space. With so much Time in our hands, and so many replacements already charted out, we still feel lost. We still find it impossible to breathe in this horrible vacuum. We strive to make a Home out of this new found hostile void.

Space. It indeed changes everything.

The Flight

She watched it in a state of admiration. Transfixed, she registered its every move as it flit across the wide open sky. An almost negligible, yet distinguishable black shape; a phenomena not very much out of the ordinary, that, in the moment, moulded into something of great magnitude.

A scenery of green mingled with grey dashed past her, but her eyes never left the blue canvas tinged with black.

And then all of a sudden, she lost sight of the bird. Craning her neck, she frisked the horizon, but it had become one with the blue infinity...... Its funny how anything bordering on ‘depth’ is tagged with the colour Blue. BLUE!! The infinite sky, the deep blue sea.. Blue..!!

Blue.. The word lingered in her mind for what seemed like an eternity. She loved Blue. Always had, since the time she could remember. Amongst an assortment of shades, Blue always stood out loud. Never did she understand why though. Why so much affinity to this colour in particular? But now, as she fondly gaped at the clear blue sky, she found the answer reflected in her dark eyes.

The train came to an abrupt halt. She was jolted out of her reverie and in her uncomfortable state of inertia she spotted it again. There it was! Or was it a different one? But then again, would it matter? It would still mean the same. The reason for which she raked the skies for a glimpse of a bird wouldn’t change. The reason they fascinated her wouldn’t either.

The same way, that Blue would never cease to seduce her. The expansive Blue and the Unconstrained Bird! Together, to her, they spelled out Freedom. Yes, that’s what it was. Total, Infinite, Freedom!

Liberty. Something that finds its place as an abstract concept in black and white; That is fantasised by most, but probably conquered by none. What we are really left with, at the end of the day, is a moist, realistic illusion.

<< We are all just Prisoners here, of our own device >> quotes a great song. And it puzzlingly makes her think of Sisyphus. Probably the only character she knew, who came to terms with his jailed, chained Destiny; who tore open all the layers of Illusion to glare hard at Reality; to understand it, to accept it, to embrace it and to live with it.

Even a bird is stalked by predators. The blue sky without exception is drained of its colour every night and is sucked into annihilation. We are all restrained by our everyday schedules in a seemingly free world. We all dream, but hardly do we ever achieve.

And for some absurd reason, that’s reassuring. Beneath the underlying order that we create, there lies Chaos. Chaos, that if once disengaged, would be insurmountable. Chaos in direct relation to the realisation of Total Freedom.

She shivered as she imagined what it would be like if the concept of Total Freedom actually took shape in the real world. The mayhem that would fall upon, would undoubtedly lead to Apocalypse.

Illusions are good, she thought to herself. Not everyone can deal with Reality. Not everyone is Sisyphus.

Sacrifised

Deafened by the roar of chaotic cries
They fight the profound supersonic silence
Blinded by the hot pricking sticking soot
They struggle, strive, hope for guidance.

Wide empty sockets reflect his terrorised kingdom
As he rested in piece on his rotting throne
While those with life gazed upon him,
Now a blackened, bloody hollow soul.

Innocent, yes that they were [chorus]
Prisoners of an incoherent vessel
Lived like The Great Sisyphus
But dead at the command of a whistle

Numbed by disorientation
By disbelief, by the repeated violation
The wound, seldom healed
Is torn open, yet again, with aggression

Tired of chasing a cure
For an infestation that might not have one
Violence is multi-faceted monster
That, with time, changes its definition


Acceptance, thats the first most painful step [bridge]
For something that never would make much sense
Accepting that we are pawns in a bloody game of chess
A gory game of chess
A pathetic game of chess

A Day Like No Other

I had to write about today. How could i not? With all that it has made surge in me. I owe it to this day. I had to talk about it. It was indispensable. Unavaoidable. Unfathomable.

To many, in a brief description, it would be a seemingly ordinary day with a minute change in the nature of events. But to me, the magnitude of this change was not just gigantic, it was crucial. It embodied everything that it boiled down to at the end of the day; or rather, in this particular case, at the end of the year.

It was one of those days where you find youself floating, physically and metaphysically, from one event to another, from one feeling to another – from one shift in emotion to another. One of those days, where everything gets a superficial chaotic shell; but deep in its core, we know that nothing ever fit so wonderfully like the way it did now. Deep in the core of things, beneath the apparent mayhem, things made perfect sense – they were right where they were supposed to be. Underlying all the disorder of regualr schedules, rituals, programmes, time tables, blah blah blah, were the pieces of the puzzle merging together. The scattered pieces towards which the teachers, the staff, had been working all year long – so that at one moment, they would make us see the big picture.

And today, i saw it. I understood what it was all about. It was exactly this sense of mingled feeling that attracted me to the profession of teaching. the attachement that gradually builds its way up the teacher and the student, the bond that is unlike any other, the gratitude and the feeling of accomplishment. The sense of having achieved something and to have made a difference, how ever negligible it may be, in somebody’s life. Knowing full well, that one day, my memory could be erased permenantly from the kids conscious. But also, that what the child learnt today, would never be erased. Never. And that would be as good as holding me in his memory. Because a teacher is nothing more than the knowledge that he/she imparts. And as long as that finds a way to hold on to the borders of memory, the teacher stays alive inside the student too. Anti-destin achieved. And that is indispensable.

Like today was. Today, through a hazy, frenzy, whizzy bubble, i saw reality. Reality of the moment. Reality of the difficulty to say goodbyes with a teary smile. Reality of satisfaction and accomplishment, at the teachers’, students’ and the parents’ end.

So now I sit alone in this huge, nude classroom; devoid of all color, and the aftermath of the emotional tornado seems to prick me deeper somehow. The absolute, heavy, loud Silence, moist with the sensation of complete Nihilism reinforces and replays every moment of the days gone by. And sitting alone, with noone for company but the souvenirs of these past three months graved in my memory, i find closure. And then i think out loud ‘mince! c’est dur les adieux’

Corps, Esprit, Ame - Amalgame

Desnos, on m’appelle

Qui sait, pourtant quel

Certitude il y en a

Robert, on m’ nomma

Boulevard Richard-Lenoir

Ou Cimtière Monparnasse

Tchecoslovaquie

Plutôt L’Allemagne nazie?

Ces camps de concentrations

De mon corps froid

De mon âme errant

Toujours si errant

Tel qu’erre l’air

L’air si deicieux

Si savoreux

Si Libre

Bribes dispercés

De mon Moi fragmenté

En quête

Toujours en quête

A travers les ombres

De petites faites

L’autodidacte

Somnambulistique

Malade du typhus

Où mêlent mes fantômes

Fantastiques

Qui suis-je?

Si pas une ombre lourde

Parmi les ombres sèches

Sinon une fantôme violette

Errant, enfin errant,

Toujours errant, en une quête

L'Elixir

Devant une page blanche

Je me trouve

Aucune raison, aucune justification

J’y découvre

Tout les lettres volés

Tout utilisés

Que c’est exigent!

Les 26 points à préciser!

Non je m’efforce

Je me pousse

Dans la blancheur des pages grisatres

Je m’y jete

À fond

Afin d’y réperer

Mon Moi profond

Non je comprends bien

De mots qui m’echappent

Me narguent de loin

Je ne céderais pas

À cette virginité apparente

Je l’écraserais, je la tacherais

Avec le sacré encrier

Enfin voilà que ça sorte

Ça s’exteriorise

Le catharsis s’est déclenché

Rien au monde pourra ralentir

L’écoulement de cet Elixir

Elixir qui a noirci les pages blanchâtres

Elixir qui m’a aide à renaître

Sanctum

The sheet of darkness

The glow of light

It all is monochrome down there

It is all black and white..

The raw cavern surface

Bouncing back the soft cries

The silky velvety water

Dripping sharply from the stalagmites..

The Sacred traps you

In her dark womb..

Rocking you like a little baby

Slowly stifling your cries..

At the aisle of the Sanctum

You heel..

Praying for a miracle,

Craving for light

‘So far down here, you will find no God’

You will, instead, find the glossy stream

Reflecting your very own ghostly visage

A façade so raw, so real..

Yelling through the river bed,

God, He is You,

In you, believe you must, instead..

With great responsibility, comes great power

Bellows the enormous cave..

Fight me, defeat me,

Find a way through my soggy maze..

Each his own Messiah

And for the others too..

The path to Illumination

Involves decisions crude..

And so having found You Sanctum

I wish no longer your cradle

That cradles my fellows in the arms of death

Dark, damn, cold..

I wish to hunt the radiance again

To bathe in its glorious warm wings

For the Sanctum made me find myself

The quest will thus begin

I know you, I feel you

With so much might I seek you

The White that erases the Black

The Light that extinguishes the Dark

Retrospection

I held that roughly painted stone in my hand. And as I held it, a warm, familiar sensation ran up my fingers. I felt it flow through every inch of me, piping lukewarm emotions coupled with bitter sweet nostalgia.

And then, I sensed that little girl again. That little girl that took such great efforts to fashion the tiny piece of stone that she held so many million years ago. That little girl that I, one day used to be..

It brought back everything. Every feeling that made me for the tiny person I was. Every fragment that was left back with the erosion of life and age. I found her. And for that fraction of a second, I became whole. Whole with who I am, with who I used to be.

A grin, a glint in the eye, and a whole rush of nostalgia. I relived it again. Every little bit of it. And alongside, so did she. She came back to life. Back with her sack of innocence, with her catch of naive ness. With the sole objective to paint the stone in the most esthetic way possible. Why? I ask her today. She doesn’t know. Just for the heck of it, she says.

And then it dawned on me. When was the last time I did something for the heck of it? I am still thinking. Trying to rummage through my memory. For something. Desperately. To reassure myself that I have not lost her entirely. That she’s still an obscure part of me. The child that I so loved to be. The child that was dying to grow up. That finally did.

Its funny how time plays with your mind. How childhood seems so much more appealing when you grow up. And yet, not so much. If given the chance, I would not want to be a child again. Not really. But I would trade in anything for that sense and feel of childhood. The raw, brut atmosphere that was a part of me. That still is. But not in that quantity.

She’s still a part of me. Its indispensable. She made me for the person I am today. She’ll never leave me. I would never let that happen. I won’t deny it, she did go through a reasonable amount of change. But that was a given. Vital. Someone once said 'Il faut que la Jeunesse passe', It is crucial to leave behind our childhood. But what part of it? They didn’t care to explain that now did they?

But I can guess. Cause I experience it. I sense a child in me. Not wanting to get out in the open, but a child that needs suppression more than once in a while ;) . and that’s probably the reason that I don’t want to go back to being a child. That’s cause I never really stopped being one. The little girl was there all along. The memory and the nostalgia that the stone jogged just made her come alive in my conscious. To spot her. To recognize her. To remember to always be a host to her.

And thus, I still hold the stone in my hand. The wonderful sensation that dashed through my body as I held it has disappeared. Probably never to be back again. The stone has accomplished what it had to. It reunited me with something that was a significant part of me. That still is a significant part of me. And now I know, would always be a significant part of me.

An inhospitable environement

I don’t know where to begin. Thoughts flow in a disoriented sort of way. Making it difficult to form them. Arrange them. Extract meaning out of them. Or its just probably because I’m in half a daze. My mind focusing in and out of clarity.

The only thought I manage to gauge from this whole mess is that I don’t fit in here. I can’t believe I’ve never realized that before. I guess I was just content in my own sphere of reality that I didn’t realize I was indeed in a sphere. And that this sphere was suspended in a universe which I always knew existed, but of whose true nature remained alien to me.

Until now of course.

Now, the bubble has broken. And instantly, I am thrown headlong into a space unknown and known at the same time. The matter, I’m familiar with. Its something that has seeped in the innermost me. But it’s the unfamiliarity of the environment in which it breeds that shook me. The environment towards which, it seems, I’m the only one who’s not adapted. Or might I say, refuses to make an effort to be adapted.

Its difficult to explain what I was going through at that time. What I am at this instant. Suddenly I felt like I didn’t belong here. I had a whole definition of what it meant to be a musician. To be a rocker. But this! This was like knowing to swim, but not able to because you are in the dead sea or in the middle of a stormed ocean. The matter didn’t change. The environment did. And this minute tilt turned everything upside down.

How am I supposed to enjoy music if the air in which it is being produced is polluted every single minute by a fag or a joint? I mean, what is the principal interest here? Music or Dope? Can these two words exclude each other anymore? Before my passage into this smoke filled cube, the thought of this bizarre question would never even have occurred to me.

But now, it makes me wonder. Makes me question the motives behind the decision of young kids to play music. Seeing a 16 year old smoke a joint is not funny you know. It made my head explode with anger. Not that I was unaware that these things do happen. I always knew that rockers were as synonymous to dope as fish to water. But I guess reality really hits you dead on when you experience it yourself. It doesn’t store it like a piece of information, but transforms it into an experience which makes a greater impact.

That is exactly what hit me today. The full blow of the knowledge of dopers and smokers around music turned into an experience. And it was not pleasant. The only black pawn surrounded by millions of white ones. Questions sprung in my head. Why am I the only one who’s having difficulty in tuning myself in to this environment? Does it make me any less of a rocker if I don’t smoke a joint? Because believe you me, these kids doing drugs are one heck of musicians. Talented even. But equally disgusting. And just cause breathing in this room is potentially endangering my life and making me uncomfortable does not mean that I should be kept from what I love to do.

And then again, there are rockers who are clean. Who jam just for the love of jamming. I know that is like a drop in the ocean. But I know them. I am a part of them. And I don’t need to get used to things I don’t want to get used to. They somehow restore my belief that music created by a daze-free, drug-free head can also de darned good! And I’m lucky enough to belong to the bunch. The majority can do what they feel correct. It really is none of my business. As in the end, it all comes down to one tiny, powerful word. Music!

The Obscure Hope..

And she stood there. Firm fingers clutching the door that she would soon be closing and locking and bolting, this time forever. The same door that she had programmed herself never to open. The same door, that despite herself, she had let open. The very door that had poured light into her obscure room for an instant. An instant that would probably last her an eternity. That she would make her last for an eternity.

Like a slice of life that she always dreamed of was squeezed in for a moment between all of the rotten past and the future to come. She got the taste of what it would be like. It still lingered there.. would probably forever. Years later she would remember what it tasted like. The bitter-sweet pungent flavor would be as fresh as it is today.

And yet there she stood. Watching the light, that had found and illuminated every darkest corner , moving away from her.. a speck of bright sparkling Hope fading away into nothingness.. into bitter Disappointment.

So there she stood. Swallowed by the darkness that overwhelmed her. A black velvet sheet of Disappointment enveloped her. Gazing into the far end of the road where the light had turned a corner. Probably to never take a detour.

But still she stood. Grounded to the spot. Unable to slam the door shut. Unable to retreat into the practical, rational world that she had painstakingly fashioned for herself. A world that left no room for the glow of Hope. That had shut all its doors to it.

But the imprint that the bright retreating beam left behind her eyes rooted her. It felt like an illusion to the one thing she had not taken resort to. Hope. The one thing that, for her represented nothing but trouble. She preferred to not hope. It just made life easier. And now she understood why. ‘the gloom that encases me seems so much more dense than before that wretched light pierced my world’ she thought.

And with all the effort that she could muster, she banged the door shut. Leaving no trace of what had come and gone. Leaving no further room for access. ‘I’ll get used to this obscurity again’ she thought. ‘it’ll seem less dark tomorrow’ she believed. She’d been there before. Done that. But she was done with Hope. No more of it for her. A new page was turned. A page that had no room for the group of letters that deformed her life for an instant.

Hence, there she stood. And in the obscure darkness, she felt her lips twitch into a well deserved smile.