play
Serenity is not a still, peaceful meditation amidst the storm and chaos; it is the grace and humility one learns as a leaf in the wind, carried up and around, content with it’s fate left to fate. We feel ‘right’ with our feet on the ground, our fingers curled around the hanging straps of the subway car, our waists bound by the roll bar on the rollercoaster. We feel ‘wrong’ when weightless, when dreaming, when out of control.
I say damn the anchors. I say let’s try to become beautifully wrong. Say the wrong thing, eat the wrong thing, walk the wrong way, sing an awful song. Sing the very first song you ever sang, off key, messy, half-forgotten lyrics. Something honest. Let’s get it out, let’s help our exterior facade try to compromise with our disgustingly compressed inner selves. Let’s look, and act, and dance about with the depravity, false confidence, strong, indefensible convictions, impatience, undiscipline as our child’s soul would have us dance. Let’s take our demons for a walk once in a while so they don’t soil the carpet.
I won’t give up my demons, because I’d lose my angels too. My only gift I value is my gift of thought, my parallel, rational, absurd, comical thought. Life as tragedy is perceived through our role in the act, and transcribed and translated to our senses by life as satyr play, a comic, a farse. Our fantasy, our perception. There is structure to a comedy of errors; and indeed, we are errors of god if little else. The right line, the right movement or mannerism; it’s all in the script. I say eat the fucking script, and spit out whichever line you want.
Make a little chaos, make a little beauty. Fumble around with the clasp of a bra for the first time again. Nobody is watching you, nobody cares how fast you slide it off. She’s not impressed that you can go through the motions with precision; if you are precisely anything, you are precisely and deplorably proud. Be in the moment, bathed in the darkness, awkward as fuck. Get back to yourself, live and learn a little.
Suppose truth be a woman. Well, she’s not judging you. She doesn’t criticize your off-key song. She doesn’t reject your awful poetry. She eats the terrible meal you cooked for her with a smile. Truth is our one love worth the courtship, and in it’s service, we cannot fail. The truth of the matter is, even when you’re ever so fucking wrong, in how you act, in how you acted; in that purity of wrongdoing, I can find you ‘right’.
We are insects on a speck of dust. Ants scurrying over the hill, moving at random, no discernable purpose, but acting in tandem and dance with one another. I say embrace that chaos. I say lose yourself in the crowd once in a while. Leaf to the wind. Join the chaos, breed a little silliness. We exist in context of role in the play. So play!
Play!
~ Driz
Forgive me a little rambling on this topic. Not a direct response, but with the backdrop of the music I’m listening to right now, I’m just going to type.
A little chaos is a beautiful thing. I smiled when you scoffed in an earlier discussion when I mention that I enjoyed the concept of chaos, but you’ve touched on what I meant.
Regardless of whether or not I act on it each day, I conceptualize all the possibilities that chaos makes possible, and see the value, the absolutle necessity, of recognizing the thousands of paths you can take to do anything. Hell, I even act on them sometimes, with varying severity, results and hilarity.
I enjoy my hair combed a certain way, going to bed at a certain time, a certain amount of ’structure’ in my life – but it’s all just constructed with the knowledge that the rules are all arbitrary and not rigid. If I felt like it wasn’t meeting my needs, I’d abandon the parts of it that weren’t working and move in the direction that felt right. Self-imposed rules are just that – only important in the context that they’re doing you good in your life and with the caveat that you don’t take them too seriously.
That’s probably why I never found a program in University that I truly enjoyed – I moved back and forth in an institution, searching for interest, for passion, and found little more than brittle, rigid bureaucracy within the system. It was all just rules, rules, rules, damn any semblence of exploration, engagement, playing with ideas. If you suggested something outside the specific boundaries of routine or the expected, you weren’t partaking in play, you were just wrong. The only saving grace I found there were the people that I was lucky enough to meet, learn from and befriend. Beyond that, it just taught me to be more critical of the system which I exist in, by proving to me yet again it’s not to be trusted at face value.
I feel truly heartbroken for those who can’t see room for flexibility and, as you so eloquently put it, play in their daily lives…
To see nothing beyond the routine and schedule would be… How to even describe it?
The death of imagination?
The failure of free will?
The pacification of a mind and soul by an oppressive regime masquerading as a free society? (Dramatic? Probably. But fair, I think.)
So, best to try opening the door to the windowless room – see what’s out there to play with. True, you might get hit by a car or break your leg playing sports, but at least you’ll get some sun and have a blast. Besides, is breaking a leg having an adventure really worse than going insane staring at the same four bare walls every day?
Dach
“Here comes the sun…”
You went to the shopping mall with pennies and seconds for trade, found little to buy, but fell in love with the shoppers themselves.
How easy it is to love the like-minded.
There is no death of imagination; only death. Imagination is something powerful enough that it cannot be killed by any but the best of us; and those who could deal it fatal blows would not. If it were not a question of conscience, it would certainly be a question of taste.
There is no free will to fail, either. There is only will, and it is the least free of all things, satisfaction rushing to desire, desire leaping to satisfaction. By the same token you would believe that to ride a certain sort of roller coaster, you’d be wild and out of control, but only because you ignore the tracks beneath it can you feel as you would. We are passengers to our lusts and desires, not coolheaded shoppers looking for the next bargain and deal.
I spit at free will.
Pacification of mind and soul? Words like pacification are what fucking pacify us. Look at how we mutilate our understandings. Look at how we misuse the strongest words we’ve ever developed!
Idea. Hope. Genius. Special. Beauty. Love. Death.
Aristocratic words.
Mundane. Common. Ritual. Censor. Average. Same.
Plebian words.
And this just to name the first that come to mind; I could type all night if I were to chronicle these lost ’souls’. Think how we add to their minimalism and their taste such colour in broad strokes, such image and memory, such demands and such prejudices – until you and I can both now speak of ‘trust’, and stupidly expect we discuss the same thing.
Self-imposed law is only the first fucking step in the development of self-imposed lawlessness. We forget so quickly and with such ease that the laws of our physical self, in a sinister way, forge the laws of our ’self’.
You cements your aesthetics and your schedule and call it free will. It’s cause for laughter and complaint. This is not the untruth of the devil or the delusions of the self; these are the seductions of will, designed by stronger men with stronger ideas. Fate (or men, or scoundrels, I might better say) demands a price, and you’re paying it gladly, same as the rest of the crowd at the shopping mall.
What a sad evening.
~ Driz