11/11/2021
Black and white, dark and light, the joy and the fight: a sequence of snapshots
All photos were taken myself on a Kodak M35 film camera
Isaiah 43:1-2
God (via Isaiah):
“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.”
(English Standard Version Bible)
A Long Day
I’m making choices, to ignore the voices
They insist I’m alone, a fantastical hoax
I was sixteen when it became clear
It was no dream to live a life here.
Lingering shadows and defanged ghosts
Their power sapped, but nerves are still attached
The people encourage me, I’m up and managing
I own my fragility, but feel like I don’t know anything.
Night-time comes, there is nowhere to run
Those nocturnal worlds, where blood curdles
The hardest ones though, are the joyful pictures
Now reframed in woe, my annihilated wishes.
Head going up in flames, trying to think about grace
Some days I’m growing, other days choking
Lying lullabies say that I’m always all right
When fluctuating days make up this life.
To be tender today is to be a kind of brave
Putting demons to death with every ragged breath
No kind of animal is as savage as these
But I will avoid the fall, to be scarred, but free.
The Brass Blues
I would finish playing the song and put the trombone down. I’d wipe spit from my mouth, my hand brushing lips indented with a mark from the mouthpiece. I’d lock the slide in place. My mind would race over the performance analysing it, excited or regretful, regardless, I always felt relief that it was done. If I was in a school uniform I’d bow then look away from the audience and quietly leave the stage. If a few years had passed, and I was wearing a different kind of dress, I’d finish my part and scan the crowd for reactions, still moving to the beat. I even remember feeling good.
The Underworld
The bilge on the underside of the great ship festers. Tiny organisms begin to spread in the viscous muck, drifting through sea water, attached to human industry in motion, a new disease in the ever-changing ocean. The ship is all sharp edges, around which green, fleshy mosses creep and slowly compromise its impregnable face with rot. The ship itself remains unchanged in its efficacy and continues in its journey, wrapped in the dirt of the polluted waters, its passengers unaware of the underworld embracing them. Its shiny façade is clothed in crawling things, fresh paint obscured by the canker and corrosion of defiant flora and fauna, breeding on any available surface in the deep.
Sometimes I wonder if that ship is me.
Disinfecting Dirt
I always thought I was good at reading minds, but now my talent has been dashed, and I realise I know nothing, and the great silence is louder than gunfire, and no less painful. It’s like I’m a guest at my own burial, asking what happened, and how I could be six-feet under in the dark in both life and death. There is no ‘curiouser and curiouser’ about those underground caverns, no dawning light in my eyes, just a sense of being swallowed whole.
So one day I decided
The bacteria in my life
Will now meet its death
A scourge, an infected knife
I’ll kill it with fire in one breath
Grass is singed beneath my feet
When torches of flame crash down
Once beacons of light shining sweet
They burn the landscape to the ground.
The Korean ‘love heart’ gesture
Looking for a Ballad
Musically speaking, I never thought this Libertines-loving kid would one day love Korean girl bands. K-pop is a relatively new addition to my musical lexicon and there are a couple of soloists who I enjoy as well. One of them is called IU and she sings about bright colours and pretty things and death. BLACKPINK is a band and they mostly sing about dysfunctional relationships and how cool and edgy they are. It seems shallow, but when I lay my head on my pillow at night playing the day back in my head, having different stimuli and moments that aren’t just reflections on the existential suddenly becomes valuable. And their dancing is incredible. When I was a dancer it was mainly down the classical ballet lines, and we couldn’t do sassy hair flicks as our hair was glued to our heads in migraine-inducing buns while we leapt around, nary a strand out of place. But then I discovered The Libertines, and now I’m here listening to k-pop, with my hair flopped around my face, wondering, ‘Who is she?’
Then the music video finishes and reality hits; I realise that these really are just moments, because in the soundtrack to my life there is no ballad being sung, just a hum in the shower or a whisper to myself in the early hours. No chamber orchestra, just a frantic conductor, gesturing to no one in particular. I lie on my rug and stare at the scenes on the inside of my eyelids, choppy pictures one after the other, with no choir song to bring them together. So the film continues to play silently and once more I am alone, thinking to myself that this is living, and that I would kill for a little bit of stillness and a sweet melody that is all my own. I’m hoping that when I look back at the end of my life I’ll see something worthwhile, with a tinkling piano playing a single harmonious piece as I watch it all go by, smiling to myself that it all eventually came together into one cohesive piece of music, better even than IU or BLACKPINK on their best day.
Growing Sideways
When I was a little kid I had a fruit and vegetable garden. I thought about death sometimes, but was mostly preoccupied with life, like that of my fruit and veggies. My carrots came out all twisted but still tasted good. My tomatoes smelt better than anything I could think of.
Now I think about it, not much has changed. I think about death sometimes but am more concerned with life. I relish creativity and colour. However, now my thoughts erratically jump forward and backward in time, and I can forget to prioritise the present. What happened, what will happen, the point of this and the purpose of that and sending myself into a fever because I don’t know what’s real anymore. When little-me took the time to smell the tomatoes, big-me excessively ruminates about everything and gets overwhelmed. What is reasonable? What is unreasonable? Why do I feel x way about y thing? Why is it when people flippantly say, ‘You’re fine,’ it makes me feel angry, not encouraged? And so forth. My brain is not always my friend and I usually end up feeling confused and foolish, thinking you’re a big stupid idiot to myself and then calling on a more objective source to bring me out of the cycle.
What to do? This has me thinking about agriculture again. A fruit or vegetable doesn’t have a past life or unknown future, it just flourishes in the present and makes for a more nourished world, a healthier world, a world where things grow.
Help
Journal - November 2021
I am unable to write today. I’ve got some kind of block. Yesterday the words flowed but today is a mental desert. I’m attempting my usual technique of describing my writer’s block to break out of it and into a rhythm. Writing has been such a comfort recently that I feel betrayed by this difficulty. Why not just cut my hand off and scrape my brain out of my head with a rusty spade. Sometimes it’s tempting to simply contemplate, to look through time and space and think, ‘what a waste.’ I do that a little less these days, though. In deep depression I’ll look at a crack in the earth’s crust that is my life and want to throw explosives down there, revel in the havoc and get high on the fumes. More often now I just want to leap across to more verdant ground. Even then part of me still fears that I will fall in. Whether it’s a small crack, like writer’s block, or an enormous chasm, that little fear still plays in my head: What if I slide backwards?
The opening of the baptism Bible given to me in 1992. Some kid drew in this historical artifact with a crayon and I’m still mad about it. No, it was not me.
Someone Else’s Blood
I was baptised at two months old. I don’t remember it, but some people do, people who are in my life today. Twenty-nine years later I am at the same church. It’s home. Walking through the wildflowers and stumbling through the swamps of life there is a firm foundation (refer to the quote at the beginning of the post.)
Sometimes, when I’m in pain, I feel like I’m hacking away at a mud wall, dirt beneath my fingernails as they gouge and gouge, not getting very far while stray grit splatters my face. I feel so desperate that I get the urge to sink my teeth into it and spit chunks from my mouth, dying to break through and save myself from a hideous prison. I see, feel and smell, even taste, all the gunge around and on top of me and helplessness takes hold. I realise I can’t do this on my own.
I was baptised at two months old. It was into a family that would hold my hands, remind me of who I am, watching God bring that wall crashing down, so I could step over the threshold, flecks of soil in my hair, but emancipated from my jail of death and devastation.
P.S. Sometimes I worry that some of the ridiculous things I write on this blog will be quoted back to me one day in the future. Someone will say, ‘Remember when you compared yourself to a vegetable?’ and I’ll just laugh and laugh while cringing on the inside and thinking about all the weird similes and metaphors I’ve used over my time writing this thing and wondering if I compiled them all into a book it could become ‘Metaphors: Meta-FOR Giving A Ham-Handed Analogy in Writing’. If you would buy that book, let me know. As always, thank you for reading. You are welcome to subscribe below.