VACANT THOUGHT: An Epiphany in Lockdown
I close my eyes in self-isolation from Covid-19, and I see all the trappings of insanity lining up against my bed again. I brush these off and try and arrange the sequences of my days but the calendar stopped making sense and the alarm clocks are meaningless. One day I will write about resilience and the importance of taking notes, but these days in my self-isolation from the virus, I see tomorrows melting into an eternal labyrinth of dark and day, as the assembly line of my so-called life has stopped for repairs.
Everyday I hear the pigeons in my balcony calling out to the deity of life, the maker and the keeper, and everyday in self-denial, I take a raggedy broom and sweep the pale, earthen floors below my feet, cracked and swollen, blue when I walk, and yellow. And between the fault-lines, my mind is confused, humming along to myriad song lyrics, and inventing restful visions. And everyday that reverie is disturbed by the sounds of these self-same dreadful machines, portable transistors, that let us communicate with an entire generation suffering through the trauma of their faces melting in green screen smoke.
These stories are true! Zombies are coming to town! The cornerstones no longer preserve the legacy of long-agos, because long-agos happen every fifteen minutes in this transmutantic age. Everyday the numbers of infected swell, the disease comes closer to me, to my cage, into the safety of my sanctum, the one I once shared with somebodies, but somebodies now become dust grains that become surreal petrichor with every drop of silver rain.
I try to write my miserable tale, the details no one understands, les mots de passe, rice grains. I need to empty my mind of words, so many of them, just pouring out of my skulls, ripping through my already fragmented soul, where are you going? why are you dragging me with you! None of this needs to make any sense, it just needs to happen. This is how you formulate a plan to escape confinement, this is how you erupt into something beautiful, a supernova of crimson colours, blood red, vermilion, Kermes. I could be an insect too, and I would never know the difference, because in my pinhead insect brain, along with syrupy haemolymph, would flow the legends of Khepri and Atum and Tithonus, the most useless!
Cold water gushes deep, I’m so privileged in my time. Doing yoga, the beach house behind me, the magnanimous sea in front. Take all the grief that you think that you feel through all the second-guessed thoughts that you think that you think, to all the calls to perform, to provoke, to start a fire. Breathe! Join this guild of beauty! This allure. Imagine your face filters in pink glitter, your telephone in blue-encrusted with sky; the sea will swallow your sullied soul, and the salt around the rudders of your craft will transform, now soft, into the halo of the tropical sun.
Now manoeuvre ashore, the newspapers await. They all know the cryptic secrets to world wars and inner peace, Buddhists, the hip, sensitive and open and liberal, brown-skinned and glowing with intellectual might, the supreme. Why do you need your tree, and that one small blade of grass? Why do you need The Byrds or Steppenwolf of the east, dropped down from their pedestals, these symbols of oppression, the old veterans are still saluting the Tricolour, our flag! We don’t want your story in its internalized legacy of coercion, the Earth is older than your mourning for the music that demised.
Nothing written, is ever true.
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Peace.
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