Flour-marks and Mondays

You detach yourself. Like chunks of rock falling off the side of a cliff, refusing to be part of it, falling deep down to its foot in an attempt to rise on its own. For though the rock is high up on the cliff wall - closer to the sun, closer to the idea of sky - it is not part of the cliff. Monday mornings are filled with abstract thought after a Sunday evening which isn't as much Sunday as a precursor to Monday. Weird but true. Engrossing activities are demanded. More than its intrinsic value, the beauty of abstract thought, or abstract art for that matter lies in its ability to depict reality more powerfully than conventional forms allow. It has the potential to transcend the barriers of grammar.


He argues. His voice is loud, his argument laced with fact, a lot of fact. Disjoint fact, often incomplete fact, but an overwhelming amount of them and a subsequent lack of deduction. I like relationships. I could sacrifice the number of facts in order to play with the few I have. The uncannier a relationship, the more fascinated I am. My ignorance of the rest is perhaps the price I pay, but it is a choice I make. Or a choice that is made for me, as most choices of this kind tend to be. I hear him argue with another and I give up on inserting my thoughts into them. The air fills up with clamour. As he speaks, his ears close off, his mind draws the shutters. He's walking on a single rail, tip-toeing over it. The rail is slippery, gleaming under a midday sun. All senses close away to help him maintain balance. It is no longer a debate. Voices are like fists meeting mid-air, their deafening collision silences onlookers. I choose the luxury of being an outsider where it's easy not to get sucked into the emotional whirlpool. Everything inside is calm, for there is much to hear. Adversaries seem to bang their heads against walls that shall not break, but heads might. Louder and the more forceful a voice is, larger is the amount of fear it conceals.

Back at the ring, the symbolic ring, it is not a battle of words, but of application. Of understanding, of giving shape to ideas. Loud voices have no role there. It is hardly surprising that defeats demoralize him. He shrivels up. This was always there beneath the surface waiting to happen. It's just that circumstances are the catalyst this time. Deep down, knowledge is not the primal goal that inspires, it is a feeling of superiority that results from the possession of obscure fact and a seeming understanding when challenges will be rare. For spectators, despite possessing powers of deduction are yet to learn the language. Illusion drives him. He has to balance upon the rail, for the world beyond it is new, it is unknown. It will challenge him in unfamiliar ways, ways he is afraid to name, ways that perhaps have no name. There are far too many parts of him he turns a blind eye to, parts that are hidden under a veil of assumed knowledge and 'shoulds.' To him, being stripped off the idea of supremacy is to be naked, defenceless, utterly alone, to stare the unknown in its eye. The drawn curtain is just one of the many we must learn to lift on our journey in search for the true nature of the self.

But unlike many others, he has a good heart. Above all, a good heart. To be cherished over much else.

"The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us...these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road...aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world."

~Pirsig