being (M)other: cypress colored voic(E)

I don’t know why he chose to tell me those stories. But they colored my porous heart with the cypress colored voice.

Walking past a park on one of my not so bright mornings, a glance at one of the cypresses, whose impressively upright detachment radiated an air of warmth, brought the melody of the fables. We strolled the streets without an intention to stop at any of the places we passed by. And yet, some things seem to be irresistible. One such topos occurred to be the record store where I heard a track that now in my memory exists only as a signpost in the story that was exchanged as we walked. The actual sound of what I think was the saxophone (but it can as well be a fantasy fabricated to supersede the lost experience) remains a lingering veil over that afternoon now safely lulled in the embrace of the past.

My friend told me about his ant with whom he grew up, having been abandoned by his mother after her decision to dedicate her life to a serious investigation of the shady side of life. Her decision was reinforced by a newly established relationship with a guy who happened to be a key figure in the mathematico-artistic scenes of that time. King of obscure undercurrents. Genius of original duplicity. Not only was he nocturnally charming, but his charismatic personality was a centripetal force in the circles generally inclined to dispersion. The mother fell into the category of the particles of that universe undeniably attracted to and held by the gravity of that demimonde colossus.

Sooner rather than later, she discovered her secret passions. One of them was unsatiable  hunger for digging layers of consciousness with occasional excursions into the unconscious. She joined a dance collective whose philosophy predictably drew from the ancient Vedas. With a strong predilection for eclecticism, the group combined the Sanskrit wisdom with extremist shamanistic, trance-inducing practices. Later, this was to be recognized as kernel in the descendant subcultures founded in the philosophy of immediacy, apolitical social agenda, and corporeal metaphysics. Before the time of these contemporary gregarious enthusiasts came, my friend’s mother and her mates were grooving and steaming in a feverish anticipation of being combusted out of livelihood and from life.

They were against the division between inner and external world. Instead, they preferred to understand the world as an extension of a human being. That enabled them to freely link their bodies to whatever surrounding and to sustain communication between what is typically perceived as two realms of existence. Their denial of such boundaries found fruitful justification in allowing an intake of a radically versatile character to freely nourish intercellular spaces of their bodies. That, coupled with the abovementioned artistic bodily practices, ensured that phenomena such as levitation be but a warm up exercise in the series of mind-expanding experiences. To live such life meant not to want to stop even for a second at the expense of those meditative ecstasies. Players’n’mounteneers at heart, they projected passions onto either exalted speech or elevated states of mind. To persevere in exercising that bottomless body of spiritual research was to be ready to leave behind everything and anything that could preclude advancement  on the trajectory to the ever inspirational unknown. She died like the rest of the like-minded from the circles—in the flame of the hearts irrevocably committed to the transcendental expansion of the body and mind.

Before that, she shared her prophecy. Here’s what remained recorded in the cracks of the vulnerable factory walls:

zarry(E)’s Prophecy: why i do what i do:

When  I was a wee lasdsie, I didn’t know I was going to die one day. That’s why I could laugh. That’s why I could play. Then I grew up and was told that I was going to die one day. That’s when my laughter started turning into anxious giggling. Overshadowed by the knowledge about the future, the embryo of my smile was destined to a half-aborted life.  I wasn’t able to laugh freely anymore. I was leading a life robbed of the gleam I once knew. I was a young lasdsie at the threshold of maturity and I found a lot of things to be funny. But I wasn’t sure anymore if my responses to them could be called laughter. Names did not mean anything anymore anyway. That was supposed to be comforting. But it wasn’t.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with nature. When duties and all the fun I had allowed, I’d run like a wild wind across the valleys whose hard surface whispered of the marshy layers underneath.  That reminded me of the days when I was learning how to read-write. Because it happened in the spatial time similar to the hidden boggy strata that’d be tickling my feet years after the mystery called alphabet occurred. I learned how  to love nature while I was working on the computer. Because it made me forget what I had learned previously. I thought it was comforting.

I became an adult by reaching the age when one could not be called either a child, or an adolescent, or a young adult anymore. I thought it was enough to start a new stage in one’s life. And it was, in a way. Because I got a job. As an employed person, I could do many things that I couldn’t when I didn’t have one. Many things, except feeling the grass playing with my smelly toes.  Except swimming in the subterranean lake of my youth. Except rowing down the mind-blowingly fast mountain river of my puberty. Except diving into the depths of the heights of my embryo sky.

But I can travel and see the parts of the globe that only a well-paid job can ensure. Mine does it.  It also provides me with means to keep my state-of-the arts technology updated and to sustain cutting edge aesthetics in my apartment, which I, actually, ehem…own. One of my cars is exemplary of the modern day crossbreed between poetry and space-craftsmanship. The other is like an orphan that grew up on the street and was later adopted by a sickly rich family, which is to say that it features the virility of a survivor and easygoiness of a spoilt adoptee. The former I drive when friends invite me for dinner in fancy restaurants. The latter when I think I’d go to the country and then change my mind and visit a new mall instead.

In the mall I usually spend the whole day and leave miserable because a day has only 24 hours that happen to coincide with opening hours of the stores in the mall. I always leave craving more hours. I can’t stand short days, although they all have the same number of minutes. I need more of those Cronos’s increments in order to spend more time at the place where I end up having changed my mind.  Because it helps me memorize new names. It helps me remember which curtain to buy and what kind of sofa matches my armchairs. It helps me keep my thoughts organized. My schedule neat. My stuff sufficient. It helps me forget what I once learned. And to live with the awareness of having forgotten it.

being (M)other: cypress colored voic(E) Continued

The cypress told the fable in a rainbow colored voice. About a bunch of kids living on the fringes of the cityscape. The run-down outskirts of the metropolis were covered with an irreparably grey veil exhausted from the contaminated lungs of the urban giant. The slums these kids were forced to call homes were more reminiscent of the psyche of a person suffering from severe, decade-long depression than of a monument to an architect’s expertise. Dawns were murky there. Noons dim-lit. Evenings darker than the tomb of a serial killer. There was no midnight. When the next day started one would know only by the sound of the alarm, bringing another 24-hours long misery run.

On one of such mornings, on their way to school, before they diverted from the route, the kids were walking in usual silence. That was not one. Because there was a brooding buzz over their heads…buzz of swarmed remnants of sleepless nights. Like sickness too exhausting to meet the morning. Mild fever grew into a burning hurricane ravishing the damaged liver, eating up the decomposing blood vessels…the skin beyond irritable…bloodshot eyes popping out at a slightest touch of the hostile, cold air…the brain like a beehive about to explode and send the outburst of germs to spread throughout the world smearing every corner of the universe with the infectiously droning signature jelly called wretchedness.

Sleepless nights bore humming mornings. Diversion and routine are being confusedly practiced. Aimless wandering along the faceless concrete surfaces. No site to occupy imagination. No sun to rupture the cement curtain above. No smile to break the spell of cyclic lives. Only perpetual lightless noon. On the way to and from school. That was not one. And a gang of idle-paced kids whose steps bridge the vapid space between the doorstep of the dormitory called home and the vurtual school. Noone can distinguish steps from one another.

Only the subtonic layers of the lingering buzz feature different registers. Those impalpable areas speak in a different key. Well, but how to call that key…is an enigma to me:

What is striking to me about that testimonial is, as always, the tangential content of the message. In this particular one, delivered by my friend, it is the marginal remark about incessant correspondence between him and the mother. Emotionally charged letters were not easy to handle for a young soul struggling with demons of abandonment, guilt, and self-abhorring. This, in fact, turns out to be slightly paradoxical, since the content of her letters was most decisively targeted to proving her strong affection for her son. And yet, the most powerful effect had her insistence on coping with the agony of living with the knowledge that she couldn’t bring happiness into the life that she herself gave to someone. “As your child, I am not supposed to be your agony!” That struck me as the moral of that cypress voiced encounter.